Dr. Dewey's assertion that starvation, so-called, is never a cause
of disease, and never dangerous to life and health until there is no
more tissue left on which to feed the brain and other nerve centres,
was published some years ago and I have the authority of the Doctor
himself that his contention has not been once disputed by the medical
profession. Three eminent English physicians, Drs. A. M. Haig,
George S. Keith and A. Rabigliati, and many American physicians, have
experimented with what is called starvation for the cure of chronic
diseases which have their origin in excess of inharmonious deposits
caused by overeating or careless eating. The results in all instances
recorded have been successful in modifying or curing the disease.
When patients have understood that they were suffering no injury from
not taking food they have ceased to have hunger cravings. These hunger
cravings usually come from fear or from disorder caused by fermenting
food in an overloaded stomach.
We can, then, on undisputed and practical authority, treat craving for
food or drink as a disease and therefore not rational, and starvation
as merely drawing upon the stored fuel--fatty tissue--by the dynamo of
the brain, restorable at will at any time before complete exhaustion,
without injury-- with benefit, in fact--to the machinery of the body.
The brain must first turn food into tissue, and then derive its own
nourishment from the tissue. If the right quantity of nourishment can
be introduced into the stomach, if the quality is of the right kind,
and if it is fed into the furnace of the stomach with relatively the
same wisdom that a competent fireman uses in feeding his furnace, the
brain is required to use the least possible effort in this direction,
and has its stored energy available for directing other useful action
and serving the partnership which employs it with an efficiency,
the possibility of which may be well illustrated by the herculean
accomplishments of the battleship "Oregon" in the late war in steaming
thirteen thousand miles and engaging in a great battle without a stop
or an accident, and without "starting" a rivet.
I will not tell you much of what Dr. Dewey has revealed, because I
want you to read all he has written,[18] as well as the books of the
English physicians mentioned, but I must say this much: Very little
digestion goes on during sleep, and, whether it does or not the brain
has from sixty to one hundred days' nourishment stored up within each
of us, and can feed on that without inconvenience to us, except in the
form of what is called habit craving or imaginary hunger, for the whole
of that time. A person who has been without food for an unusual time,
if he does not gorge his stomach when the first opportunity of breaking
the fast arrives, is not only better for the rest the brain has had,
but the health does not suffer in any way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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