Excerpts
Shelton, Herbert M. (1974). Fasting For Renewal of Life. Youngstown. National Health Association
Excerpt From
Fasting For Renewal of Life
Herbert M. Shelton
Page 36
There are significant numbers of people who will assure you that they are hungry before every meal and that if a meal is delayed for a single hour they will grow faint and languid. They often describe pains and discomforts in the abdominal region and some of them say that they suffer with headache. Even physiologists have accepted the popular notion that hunger is a disagreeable sensation, one verging on actual suffering. These symptoms are strikingly like those manifested when a drug addict misses his accustomed dose to which indications has been given the name, withdrawal symptoms. Dr. Page called these “hunger symptoms” a species of “poison-hunger,” thus identifying them with addiction.
Observations reveal that these “poison-hunger” symptoms are most marked in heavy eaters of highly seasoned viands. The more one is addicted to salt, condiments, coffee, tea, etc., the more severe are these symptoms. The man who eats simple fare escapes them entirely. We also know that these sensations are likely to be most severe in the diseased.
Dr. Susanna W. Dodds insisted that “The sense of all-goneness in these cases is not from a lack of nutrient material, but owing to the absence of the habitual stimulus.” No person,” wrote Dr. Chas. E. Page, “feels faint upon passing a meal, or has a gnawing stomach, except it be occasioned by an irritated and unduly congested state of that organ. It is a sure proof of dyspepsia (using this term in its popular sense, as implying the condition of that organ). Strictly speaking, the term is a synonym for indigestion.” Dr. Page well says, “A craving appetite should be treated as a morbid symptom, and should weigh in favor of abstinence.” “False hunger,” “habit hunger,” “poison hunger,” and similar phrases are misnomers. The term hunger should be reserved for the normal demand for food and some other and more appropriate term should be employed to designate those abnormal sensations that are commonly mistaken for hunger. All efforts to define or to describe hunger in the terms of pathology, as though it were a symptom of disease or itself a disease, must mislead.
Pg 60
In most instances the enema is painful and in all instances it is enervating. It may well be doubted that it is necessary to inflict suffering upon the faster or to increase his enervation in order to save his life or to preserve his health. It is certain that animals never use enemas, not even in the longest fasts, and they are not injured by any fancied reabsorption of waste. If the fasting animal does not need the enema, why does man? It is quite certain also that early Hygienists, like Drs. Jennings and Page and such non-Hygienic advocates of fasting as Tanner and Dewey did not employ the enema in the fast.
Page 71
Very early in the American experience with the fast it was discovered that what Dr. Page called “little driblet meals” do not provide for the same results as total abstinence from food. In an article published in Aug. 1850, E.A. Kittredge, M.D. of Boston, who had abandoned the medical practice for the Hygienic and Hydropathic practice, tells us of some of his experiences with the fast. In this article he says: “Even the weakest and most unstimulating of nutriment, I know by experience, is decidedly injurious; twice when sick, I have tested this to my entire satisfaction, taking gruel one day and fasting the next, and invariably I felt infinitely better on the days that I fasted, and yet I had an appetite all the time.
“Once I went ten days without tasting any kind of food, and during that time attended to my usual business, going out of town every day. And what will appear strange to some, my strength seemed to increase every day. At any rate, I felt more and more elastic every day. During this time I bathed freely and drank fifteen tumblers of water every day.”
Writing a few years later, Dr. Charles E. Page, M.D. also of Boston, who had likewise abandoned the drugging practice for one of Hygiene, stressed the fact that eating what he called “little dribblet meals” is not fasting. The experiences of Kittredge and Page have repeatedly been verified by a number of very competent men.
“Densmore did not regard the practice of feeding the acutely ill little driblet meals or giving them fruit juices as wise. He said, on the contrary, “At such times all food must absolutely be withheld from the patient.” He gives credit to Trall, Shew, Nichols and Page for having shown him the wisdom of not feeding the sick people. The repugnance to food that exists in serious acute disease is a sure sign, at least to all who are not converts to the doctrine of the total depravity of man, that no food can be used, hence no food should be taken. Nature, he says, may be trusted.”
Pg 83
Animals rarely fast when chronically ill. More often they merely reduce their food intake, but they do not have to be seriously ill to fast. A horse, for example, may be “off his feed,” when but slightly indisposed. In man a reduction of food intake may serve the same purpose, but the time involved is much greater. Many recoveries result from what Dr. Page characterized as “the effect of seven-eighths starvation” involuntarily practiced over a period of weeks or months, during which time they eat very little because they are unable to eat more. He adds that “a few days of abstinence” if taken early enough “would have saved the system from the depletion of a long-continued strain.”
Pg 88
Human history is replete with instances in which great numbers of people have been subjected to the most taxing exposures—bitter cold, rain and water in which they were forced to wade—and have “caught” nothing more than a hearty appetite for a warm meal and a cheerful fireside. In the last century Dr. Charles E. Page, Hygienist of Boston, subjected himself to many extreme exposures in an effort to produce a cold. He sums up the results by saying of one of these exposures: “I got cold, I went to bed and got warm again.” Dr. Page showed that the chief cause of the common cold is enervation and over-repletion. Over-repletion may truly be said to be a common cause of enervation. People who have frequent colds eat so much and do so so regularly that the digestion and excretion of superfluous food almost monopolizes the energy of the body.
Describing his experiments with colds, Dr. Page says that after “feeding a cold” as much as he dared, he invariably banished the cold by “abstaining from food and indulging in extra rations of outdoor air—rain or shine.” Further, he says that whenever he chose to prolong his experiment by continuing hearty eating, he found, as he observed to be the case in others, that “the symptoms would increase in severity, and to acute catarrh, headache, slight feverishness, and languor, would be added, sore throat, perhaps with pressure at the lungs, hoarseness, increased fever, and entire indisposition for exertion.” In such cases, he says, “two, perhaps three days’ fasting (one, maybe two, in bed) would be required … to reduce the fever and completely restore the balance.
Pg 103
Writing in the last century, when typhoid fever was common in all parts of the country, Charles E. Page, M.D., who had an extensive experience with the disease, said of fasting in typhoid: “I desire to emphasize the importance of a radical reform … Let me illustrate this point by contrasting the diet of an active man, in good health and of abstemious habits, with that of a fever patient. In many cases the latter consumes more food every twenty-four hours than the former. Suppose we put our robust man to bed in the average sick room, with its not over-fresh air, to say the least of it, and com pel him to swallow several ounces of milk every two or three hours, day and night, with occasional little nips of whisky, champagne or brandy, which is the stock plan of feeding in typhoid fever! In the writer’s estimation it would be difficult to devise a better prescription if we desired to produce typhoid fever. How then can it be imagined that a diet calculated to produce fever in the healthy subject will prove curative or helpful in a case already developed? It has for years been evident to my mind that this plan of ‘feeding fever’ is like playing a stream of petroleum over and through a burning building. It is found that water answers the purpose far better, in the one case as well as in the other …”
I have tested the water diet over and over again, in typhoid, scarlet and rheumatic fever, and have never been disappointed in it. It can be truly said that food, for want of digestion and assimilation, is a drug—a harmful drug—in typhoid fever, until the crisis is passed … In some of the most distressful cases that have happened to be thrown in my way, when all hope in the minds of friends had been abandoned, I have found that the withdrawal of food, drugs, and ‘stimulants’ and the substitution of simple, fresh, soft water, has produced results that have seemed almost miraculous. The reason for the frequency of relapses and fatal terminations in cases that were thought to be getting along well, may be found in the prevalent obedience to the following advice of one author in a recent important work on therapeutics: ‘Every period of apparent improvement must be seized for keeping up nutrition, and also for making a distinct impression with quinine.’
“The idea that the fever should be controlled is a fallacy. Drugs and hydrotherapeutic applications are commonly employed for this purpose. These are wearying to the invalid while the drugs add greatly to his suffering and danger. The height of the fever is governed largely by food and rest conditions. The more food and the more irritation, the higher goes the temperature. Fasting will assure that the fever will not rise to uncomfortable heights.
In the same way the restlessness and delirium that are common in typhoid may be avoided by fasting. Restlessness at night is largely a result of unintelligent care. A room too warm and poorly ventilated, a night lamp, visitors “sitting up” with the sufferer, perhaps talking and discussing the suffering and death of others with the same disease, arousing the invalid at intervals to give food or drugs—this constitutes unintelligent care. Food adds to the irritation in the digestive tract, hence to the general discomfort of the sufferer, and prevents sleep.
Pg 105
Constipation is a common term applied to the failure of the bowels to act or to sluggishness of colonic function. Most people who think they are constipated are not. They simply never give their colon an opportunity to function without their meddlesome interference. To free themselves of their imagined constipation they need only cease trying to cure it. The prescription given by Dr. Page is almost infallible. It is: “Mind your own business, and let the bowels mind theirs.” Treat the bowels kindly; give up the prodding and forcing that has brought them to their present state of inertia. Why should the bowels be whipped into activity by laxatives and cathartics when enervation is the cause of their inactivity?
Shelton, Herbert M. (1931). The Hygienic Care of Children. Youngstown, OH. National Health Association.
Excerpt From
The Hygienic Care of Children
Herbert M. Shelton
Pg 50
Beginning at birth with a program of physical education for the baby, Dr. Page insisted that babies should be placed face-down upon their beds and not upon their backs, as was and is, the rule. He insisted that they develop better and faster in this position. When an infant moves its arms and legs in this position it does so against resistance. Merely kicking the air with its legs and waving its arms while lying on the back offers no resistance. I have watched an infant push its way across the bed, lying face down, at only one week of age. Here is real exercise; exercise that calls for vigorous use of the muscles, especially those of the legs and thighs. The infant will raise its head, shoulders, hips and thighs backward, thus giving vigorous exercise to its spinal muscles. The beauty of the cords of muscles on each side of its spinal column is matched only by those of the strong man.
Pg 51
If young monkeys and apes were placed on their backs and not called upon to use their legs and arms, if they were not also forced to swing by their arms, what slow development we would logically expect! Why must we continue to hamper the development of our own young by placing them on their backs and keeping them there? Dr. Tilden, after years of employing this plan, wrote in his Care of Children (1916): “Place the baby on its belly (Dr. C. E. Page’s method), and allow it to stay on the belly rather than on the back. The Page method works out well. Children walk and run much earlier.
Pg 66
Dr. Page says: “Babies are often tortured by too many and too tight-fitting garments, through the ignorance or carelessness of their attendants, or simply to gratify a mother’s silly pride, and are treated in all respects, in many cases, more like a doll in the hands of a make-believe mother, than like a sensitive little human being entitled to every possible comfort, in the free use of the developing body, limbs, muscles and organs.” Every child is gay when it is naked; it cries when its clothes are put on, and rejoices when they are taken off. If our mawkish morality objects to their going naked, or the rigors of our climate forbid it, we may at least accustom them to sun suits and bare torsos in the finer weather.
The summer night dress should be a short, thin cotton or linen gown, or nothing but a diaper. Comfort at night means sound restful sleep. An overdressed and, therefore, overheated child is restless and does not sleep well. In winter the gown may be of heavier material and long enough to cover the feet. Over-clothing and too much covering at night cause much suffering in infants and children. Page aptly remarked, overcareful parents often force their children to undergo such an amount of clothing and “tucking up” in bed, as literally to constitute the “dry pack,” “a sweating process which is tolerable only for short intervals, being very depleting when long continued.
Pg 69
Dr. Page contrasts our methods of caring for babies with those employed in nature in caring for puppies, kittens and the young of other animals. We hold the babies, carry them, put them in baby carriages, coddle them and make of them little tyrants that are constantly demanding attention. “The young of some species,” says Page, “are, upon occasions, carried by their parents from one point to another; but beyond this they furnish their own transportation. Their parents roll and tumble them about, more or less, for mutual pleasure; but in the main they are from the beginning forced to rely upon themselves. Everywhere among animals we observe the same things: the young are never over-tended. They have no baby carts in which to spend a great part of their time, to their physical disadvantage; like our pampered baby aristocrats. They are not taught to sit down with a box of playthings in front of them to prevent them from being tempted to make their way to distant objects. If they chance to see anything they want, it never comes to them. “It is Mohammed and the mountain every time; the creature and the thing never come together, except through the exertion of the creature! Hence they grow lusty and strong and healthy. They earn their diet, and therefore it is digested and assimilated. Their frames are covered with well-knit muscles—not a continuous fatty tumor, with scarcely any sound muscles beneath. In short, they are from the very outset, kept in ‘condition.
Pg 71
Dr. Page thought the normal baby should double its size by the end of nine months, but, by this, he did not mean that it should lay on a large mass of fat. He says: “During the nine months of foetal growth the increase, except in the case of monstrosities, is about one-third of an ounce per day, or two and one-half ounces per week. Why it could be deemed rational for this ratio to be increased six or seven hundred per cent, directly after birth, is beyond my comprehension. In spite, or because, of this hot-house forcing during the first few months, the usual weight at, say, five years, is much less than if the rate of pre-natal growth had been continued throughout these years. It was his thought that the pre-natal rate of growth should continue for some time after birth and that the normal infant should double its weight in about nine months. If such babies are not fattened, this is just about what takes place. As it is the custom to fatten babies they usually double this weight, without a corresponding increase in length and structural girth, by the end of the fifth month.
Pg 96
Never was there a greater mistake. The ignorance of parents, attendants and physicians is the real misfortune in these cases. For, sickness is in no sense the result of the process of teething. “Can it be supposed,” asks Dr. Page, by “even the most ignorant, that the cutting of the teeth was an afterthought of the Creator, and that since the little ones generally come into the world toothless, this great mistake could be corrected only by a painful and dangerous abnormal process?
Pg 97
Yet there is a popular superstition that baby requires more and “stronger” food at this time. Dr. Page says: “I refer the backwardness of teething, that is, the delay and difficulty and sickness so common, in many instances to fatty degeneration caused by excessive feeding; and the consequent cessation of the normal growth of the body, including, of course, the teeth.
After comparing the enormous quantities of milk fed to infants with the relative amount a man would consume, if fed as the infant is fed, Dr. Page says: “Is it to be wondered at that the alimentary canal, from mouth to anus, becomes irritated, and the whole body, including the gums, becomes inflamed, in the case of our food-salivated infant, whose purging, wetting, nose-running, and drooling, attest to nature’s effort to get rid of the excess? And when, in time the teeth ought to appear, they prove to have become ‘stunted,’ like the bones and muscles of “he ribs, legs and arms, either through fatty degeneration or for want of the nourishment of which they have been deprived by reason of the inability of the diseased organs to digest and assimilate enough food. Nature is crying out for the nourishment impossible to obtain from undigested and unassimilated food—she cries out for growth—and there must be an upheaval, ‘cure.
Pg 100
Of the fat babies so much admired, Dr. Page says: “The excessive fat, so generally regarded as a sign of a healthy babe, is as truly a state of actual disease as when it occurs at adult age. Not only are the muscles enveloped with fat—they are mixed with it throughout and so are the vital organs—the kidneys, liver, heart, etc. Dissection, in these cases, often discloses the fact that these organs are enlarged and degenerated with fat; the liver, for example, is often double the normal size. The disease finally culminates in one of two things—a considerable period of non-growth, or a violent sickness, which strips them of the fat, if not of life.
Pg 101
Fat and plethoric children, with cheeks so red one can almost feel the fever in them, when he looks at them, are regarded as healthy children. In excessively fat infants says Dr. Page, there “follows one of three things—death; a saving sickness; or a feverish fretful state, with a gradual reduction of fat, an emaciated stage, when perhaps for a year his body and limbs resemble those of a calf, a kitten, or a young robin. Under this ‘raw bone’ state he grows as do the young or other species. The body and limbs stretch out and he grows tall.” After a time their digestive powers recuperated, another period of fattening begins. Each year death eliminates thousands who are unable to endure the strain. “This culling process goes on, in a lessening degree, up to about the age of five, when the spindling age is fairly set with the survivors, and there is a corresponding exemption from disease, the proportion of deaths from five to twenty-five being very small.
Pg 107
“It is my position that nature has provided for the needs of the human infant during this period of life as well as she has provided for the needs of the young of other mammals and that it is the absence of perversion rather than the absence of soft food or of animal milk that causes these mothers to nurse their babies and children for prolonged periods. Dr. Felix Oswald held a similar view. On page 29 of his Physical Education he says that “the appearance of the eye-teeth (cuspids) and lesser molars mark the end of the second year as the period when healthy children may be gradually accustomed to semi-fluid vegetable substances. Till then, milk should form their only sustenance. But mothers whose employment does not interfere with their inclination in this respect may safely nurse their children for a much longer period. In support of this he says: “The wives of the sturdy Argyll peasants rarely wean a bairn before its claim is disputed by the next youngster and the stoutest urchin of five years I ever saw was the son of a Servian widow, who still took him to her breast like a baby.” Supporting this position, Dr. Chas. E. Page says: “In the absence of particular circumstances compelling premature weaning, I believe that the mother’s milk providing the mother be in fair health and the babe evidently thriving on her milk, is the best food for the infant during the first eighteen months, and even until the end of the second year.
Pg 112
After the first year they are allowed more time between meals and hence a smaller proportion of them die. About one-third of the deaths are in children under one year and only about one-fifth between the ages of one and five. After the age of five, children are fed on something like a three-meal plan and comparatively few die between the ages of five and twenty. It is true, as Dr. Page says, that those children who reach five years are, as a rule, the toughest and therefore the “fittest” to survive.
Pg 113
Happily such gross feeding had disappeared among the better informed classes with a consequent improvement in the health of our babies. But it is still all too true that babies are greatly overfed and are frequently dosed. There are no reasons for doubting that dyspepsia which Page calls “the parent of nearly all our ills,” is the result of overfeeding in infancy, confirmed by continued over-indulgence through life.
Pg 114
In those days the medical profession urged two hour feeding and night feedings as well. Many older people have not yet gotten away from this view. They still think that children should be gorged until they are surfeited and sickened or else they are not fed enough. Long prior to this time, however, Dr. Page and others had proved that three meals a day are enough for a baby. Asserting that no infant can thrive unless well fed and assuming that a well fed baby is one that secures the minimum amount of suitable food that will suffice to produce a comfortable, happy, thriving baby, with body and limbs well-rounded with flesh, not fat, and whose growth shall be uniformed throughout its whole life, and until the frame is fully developed, he declared: “It is my belief, verified by experience in the case of my own infant, and from other substantial proof, that three meals a day, with sufficient restriction at each, will accomplish this end, and are all that should be permitted from birth, and the intervals should be at least five or six hours between meals.
Pg 123
Dr. Page was particularly bitter against the practice of feeding starches to infants. “Farina, corn-starch, fine flour, and refined sugar,” he declared, “are the fashionable materials for the infant dietary; but a worse selection could hardly be made.” He cautioned against the injury to the vital organs resulting from “prematurely feeding the infant on even the best selected articles of the general table,” and added: “It is not uncommon for infants to be given cakes and candies, and even pork, fried fish, cabbage, ham, potatoes, etc., while the teeth are blamed for the ensuing gastro-intestinal disorders.”
It will not do to feed mashed potatoes, corn meal mush, farina, and the like to toothless infants, and imagine that because these things can be swallowed without chewing, the problem is solved. They are also swallowed without being insalivated and are eaten by one whose digestive juices are ill adapted to starch digestion.
If we limit the following remarks of Page’s to the milk from a healthy well nourished mother, he is eternally right. He said: “Milk is the food for babies and contains all of the elements necessary to make teeth, and until they are made, it should continue to be the sole food. It is not enough that two or three or a half dozen teeth have come through, that they should be expected to do any part of a grown child’s work.
Pg 124
Babies do not need starch foods and cannot utilize them to any advantage. Many of the troubles from which children suffer are due to the practice of feeding them starch. Cereals with sugar and cream or sugar and milk are especially bad—the cereals and sugar are usually denatured and the milk is pasteurized, to add to the evils.
“Upon no consideration,” says Dr. Page, “should any of the farinaceous or starchy articles be added until the mouth bristles with teeth; then it may be justly considered that he can handle something of the adult diet.
Pg 129
“Dr. Page says: “The woman who lacks a reliable appetite for any sort of plain wholesome food, is not a well woman; if she indulges in that which is unwholesome, she cannot maintain good health; if she is overfed, abnormally fat and plethoric, she is a sick woman; and such mothers cannot supply a perfect food for the nursing child.” “Much sloppy food, hot drinks, profuse drinking between meals ‘to force the milk,’ are injurious to both mother and child. Much animal food is not advisable either in winter or summer, and in the latter season especially should be avoided altogether.” “Nausea, lack of appetite, fitful appetite, ‘gnawing’ at the stomach—the latter so generally mistaken for a demand for food—all result from excess or the use of unwholesome food or condiments.
Pg 155
All milk-eating creatures are and should be sucklings,” said Dr. Page. Milk should never be drunk like water. Nature teaches us how milk should be taken. So long as the child is to have milk, even up to five or six years, it should be given in a bottle, so that the child may draw it through a nipple. This will ensure thorough insalivation and prevent the child from hurriedly gulping it down.
Pg 156
Artificial Infant Foods are undesirable. Dr. Robert McCarrison of England, says that the “seeds” of disease that inevitably kill their victims in middle life are often introduced into the body with the first bottle of cow’s milk or artificial baby food—and he is not referring to germs, either. Dr. Page condemned these various artificial foods, advertised as “substitutes for mother’s milk” and said that, although, “many infants manage to subsist on them and in many cases, thrive on them,” he did not consider that such foods are good.
Pg 165-166
Hot weather is accused of having much to do with the fearful slaughter of the human animal—a distinctly tropical animal and certainly well adapted to a hot climate. Blaming hot weather for certain “diseases peculiar to children” and for the deaths in these conditions, is a very misleading way of saying, as Page puts it, that, “the excess of food that can be tolerated under the tonic and antiseptic influence of cold weather, engenders disease during the heated term.
Pg 172
Forced feeding converts the dining room or nursery into a battle field and, if it succeeds in getting the baby or child to eat an unwanted meal, it produces such emotional and glandular states as to render digestion of the food next to impossible. If the child is not hungry, if it is “out of sorts” and there is no desire for food, let it miss one or more meals. The child will not be injured by missing a meal or by not eating for two or three days. The parent should rest assured that the healthy child will eat if and when hungry without being forced. If he refuses food, it is because he is not hungry. Absence of hunger may be due to lack of need for food or it may be due to illness. In either event, no effort should be made to persuade or to force the child to eat. Dr. Page advised:“Don’t punish yourself by eating when not hungry or drinking when not thirsty; forced-feeding or forced-drinking is unnatural and mischievous.” This advice is for a child as well as for an adult.
Pg 189
“The scorbutic diathesis (tendency to scurvy), says Dr. Page, “is induced by deficiency of vegetable food,” especially grains and fruits, in the mother’s diet, “the milk secreted being deficient in certain vital constituents.” This statement was published in 1882, long before medical men began to recognize such facts. Mother’s milk is made from her blood and where her food does not contain the essential constituents, nature takes these out of her own tissues. But this weakens her and impairs her health. The milk is of poor quality and deficient in quantity.
Most if not all the so-called hereditary diseases are due not to heredity, in its scientific sense, but to faulty pre-natal nutrition. A farmer who would not think of working a mare in foal, does not hesitate to permit his wife to work herself to exhaustion and kill her children. But this is not heredity. I do not believe that there are any hereditary diseases and I do not believe that any amount of statistical studies can ever prove that there are. Statistics show results, not causes.
Pg 206
Dr. Page once asked a very clever old lady why it is that babies are “usually crammed full of milk every two to three hours without regard to the whether or their needs, kept puking and purging, until finally they become constipated, and writhe and shriek with colicky pains, and then the nurse or mother wraps them in hot cloths,and turns them on their bellies and tries to jounce the wind out of them. What is the use of all this?
He tells us that the lady answered rather non-plused, “why it seems as if we were doing something for ’em!” Do something for them is the thought of every mother, father, nurse, physician; when, what they need is to be let alone. If children were left alone more in health, they would be sick less and if a let alone policy were pursued when they are sick, then would die less often. Most of this “doing something for them” is really doing something to them. The amount of suffering that is caused in infants, by this almost universal habit of treating them, is incalculable.
Pg 212
Children that are sick for days and weeks are fed and drugged. These should be fasted until the stomach and bowels are cleaned out and the decomposing milk curds are gotten rid of, then fed according to their power to digest.
Dr. Page says of such cases: “Cases are on record where a change in the mother’s diet—the avoidance of meat, pastry, spices, hot sauces, tea, coffee, chocolate—and the adoption of a generous diet of plain wheat-meal bread (varied with rye, corn, and oatmeals), milk and fruit has rapidly restored infants dying of cholera infantum, without aid from any other source.
Pg 217
Parents should never give purgatives of any kind to their children, whether the physician advises it or not. Purgatives are the chief cause of chronic constipation. They upset the whole digestive tract, impairing its secretions and leaving it dry and exhausted.
Morse-Wyman-Hill say: “Great care must be taken in the use of both suppositories and enema not to establish a bad habit. It is very easy to so accustom the baby to them that it will not move its bowels without, although the need for them has long passed.” A measure that “loosens the bowels” does not cure the difficulty, says Dr. Page. “It only produces more or less purgation.” “For my own part, speaking with relation to the constipated habit so common, I consider that we should look for a remedy to the promotion of the general health, and having decided upon the diet, we should avoid frequent changes of amounts and proportions, which are always made at the risk of the system not getting accustomed to any one variety.
Page also says: “Sometimes there is no occasion for a movement for a day or two—no evidence of a desire for one. To use purgatives or injections in such cases is mischievous. A change of diet, or in the weather, may temporarily affect the babe. In bringing one overfed bottle baby to three meals, four days passed, and then he had an easy, natural movement; then three days and another; then two. After this he had regular daily passages.
Pg 240
“WORMS will never trouble a well-fed child,” says Dr. Page. “Indigestible food or overeating is usually the cause of these ‘natural scavengers.’ Bread of unbolted grain, ripe fruits, and vegetables, simply boiled or baked, infrequent meals and temperance, constitute a plan of medication that is death on worms, and better than all the nostrums and vermifuges in existence.
Pg 256
The “disease” is of the nerve centers, the cough being a “reflex cough,” and the nervous system of the child must be looked after. He should be put to bed at once and the feet kept warm. He should be given all the fresh air possible and as much water as thirst calls for, but no food of any kind until complete relaxation is secured. Children that are outdoors all day suffer less than those in the house. Whenever possible the bed should be out-doors. Otherwise, put the child by the open window. The rest and warmth will quiet the nervous system. It is questionable whether the whooping stage will ever develop if this “treatment” is instituted at the beginning of the trouble. Complete relaxation should occur in three or four days.
The commonly unrecognized evils of mental over-working of children are usually very evident in troubles of this nature. This should be particularly avoided. Complete relaxation and rest of the nervous system is very important in this condition.
After full relaxation is secured, fruit juices may be given morning, noon, and night for two or three days, after which fresh fruit may be used. If the cough tends to increase after feeding, stop the feeding at once. “It is usually observed,” says Page, “that the cough grows worse toward evening, and is worst at night. By morning there has been something of a rest of the stomach, and the cough is easier—perhaps disappears entirely. A full meal is often the exciting cause of a fresh and violent paroxysm. Other things equal, the child who is oftenest and most excessively fed will suffer most, and have the longest ‘run.’ ” After the paroxysms have ceased, gradually return to a normal diet.
Pg 297
“PLAGUING” CHILDREN
Dr. Page says: “The man who would not permit himself, nor anyone else, to ‘plague’ his colt or young horse lest it make him vicious, will devote considerable time to harrassing his infant or three-year-old child to his own and lookers-on infinite amusement, and the destruction of the child’s good temper. I have seen a group of parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, amusing themselves at the anger and vexation displayed by a little, eighteen-month-old girl, whose puzzle had been tampered with so that she could not pull it apart as she had been accustomed to do. The trap was set again and again by the elders, anyone of whom would have been incensed at the suggestion that the action was even of questionable advantage in its influence upon the baby’s character and temper.
Trop, Jack. (1961). You Don’t Have to Be Sick. New York: Julian Press.
Pg 25
The idea of feeding babies on cow’s milk is a convenient method for the mother who can now wear an uplift bra that will figuratively knock your eye out as she walks down the street. Mother’s milk factory is closed down. Baby has dozens of vegetables and fruits that come in the cutest tiny cans. Now they are putting up special chopped meats and meat soup for infants. It appears to be a diabolic plan to see how much abuse baby can take. If he follows the usual pattern baby will vomit and spit and have a bad case of colic. Then the physician will change the formula. By the time baby is a few months old other foods will begin to be introduced, highly refined oatmeal, farina, crunchie-wunchies, and a variety of other prepared cereals. Nature intended that an infant should have nothing but liquid food until it has teeth with which to chew. That is the way with all other animals that can be compared with man. Their diet is liquid until they can bite. Then they go out on their own. Dr. Page, Dr. Tilden, and Dr. Shelton, amongst others, have outlined the natural plan for feeding children. Shelton marvels at the stamina of the human system that can withstand the appalling diet of the first two years of life.
Pg 71
Elsewhere in this book claims are made that the medical profession has borrowed natural hygienic ideas, and in this instance I should like to cite in context one example of a great doctor-teacher in action. In his book, The Nature Cure of Consumption, written in 1884 by Charles E. Page, M.D., a hygienic pioneer, he quotes a case history.”
“Yes, Doctor, I have told Lettie how I cured myself after the doctors gave me up, but she will not undertake it—not now, at least—perhaps she may when she gets where I was. Do you want me to give you my recipe for the cure of consumption, Doctor? Tell you the whole story? Well, the way is simple, and the story a short one, and if it will help any one I shall be very glad. I needn’t tell you all about mother’s case—hers was the old-fashioned consumption; she was sick a good many years, but the last year she was almost helpless and would have no one but me to take care of her. Well, I bore up until she died, and then I gave out; I could not go to the grave—I was in bed during the funeral. I had not realized—none of the family had—how poorly I had become; but now it was plain enough. I kept my bed most of the time—could not get rested. I had been sick several weeks when my brother was brought home ill, was taken with typhoid fever, and there was no one to nurse him. I roused myself up and declared that I was able to do it; and I carried the point, in spite of all father could say. Well, he was sick nine weeks, but I gave up before he recovered. I carried him through the worst of it, however, before I took my bed; and then I was very sick indeed. For a while they thought I could live but a few weeks, but I rallied and got more comfortable. I raised a great deal, and for several months remained about the same, apparently; but the autumn came, and when we began to shut the house up I seemed to grow worse; my cough was still very bad, but I couldn’t “raise” much, and I suffered terribly for breath. The doctor who had been attending me—the one who had tended mother— at last said he could do no more for me, and for some months we had no physician, and then father called a new one—a young doctor who was fitting himself for practice in our village. He came to see me, examined my lungs, and I—fainted away in the effort. He went out—leaving no medicine—and had a talk with father. He said that he did not care to take the case; that there was no hope for me; my lungs were badly ulcerated, and I had but a few weeks to live. “She can’t live over six weeks, Mr. B., and she may die any day. I am young, just commencing practice, and it will injure me to have her die on my hands; and I can not help her.” “At least,” said father, “give her something to relieve
“her suffering.” They did not know that I could hear them; but springtime had come again, the day was quite warm, and I had asked to have the window raised at the head of my bed, and so it happened that I could hear all they said. I heard the doctor returning, and I resolved not to take any of his soothing drops; I had taken all I meant to….
I had read in an old English almanac—not a medical one, like the ones strewn about everywhere now, but there was a good deal of useful information in it—a “Sure Cure for Consumption….”
The recipe explained that the disease was caused by lack of fresh air, out-door exercise, and appropriate food; but I will only tell you what I did, and you will understand all about the reasons for it.
“I could not move from the bed alone, but I had them carry me on a comforter out on the lawn and lay me down there. How was I to take exercise—when I could scarcely turn myself in bed? was the question. Well, I did turn myself on one side, and, with a stick, began to dig a little in the ground. It looked then as though I should not do much damage to the nice sod father had taken so much pains to make; but I dug a little hole as large as my fist, and then rested. After a while I turned over on the other side and dug another little hole, filled it up, and rested again. It seemed good to rest and I felt a little better; for the outdoor air, and the exertion I had put forth “loosened” my cough a little, and I began to “raise.” At night they carried me back to bed. “y bed-room windows had been wide open all day, and I wouldn’t have them shut now; but in answer to their fears about the night air and catching cold, I said, “Give me clothes enough, and I will risk the night air—I’m going to breathe pure air the next six weeks—if I live so long.” They all felt terribly—they thought I was shortening my life, even then—but they yielded, finally, in everything, even to not asking me “if I couldn’t eat a little of this, or that, if they would make it for me?” I had replied: “No, when I feel like eating a piece of Graham bread or a potato, without butter or salt, I will eat something—not before….
“I began to feel hopeful—the novelty of the idea—digging my own life! I took a desperate view of it—six weeks to live—”I’ll die fighting,” I said to myself. It seemed almost droll—droll enough, at any rate, to interest my mind, and I would say funny things to the others to make them laugh, and this seemed to make them try to be cheerful and to cheer me on….”
“I was impressed with the idea of “earning my living” at outdoor work “by the sweat of my brow”—and not to eat more than I earned by the exercise. I had renounced my coffee and tea; I ate no grease of any kind, nor meat—bread, fruit, and vegetables only—no salt or spices, pastry, pie, puddings, nor cake, no “sweets” of any sort, except the natural, whole sweet furnished by nature, in the form of vegetables and fruits. The prescription said that some people ate too much soft food,—bread and milk, puddings, and the llike,—and that while such dishes were better than many others in common use, still they were not the best, especially for sick people with weak stomachs, but that dry (farinaceous) food was every way better; and so I ate bread, or unleavened biscuit, which, after a little practice, the girl could make very nice,—just the meal and water well mixed and moulded stiff and baked in a hot oven,—and I ate them very slowly, chewing each mouthful thoroughly. You can tell, perhaps, doctor, just why this should make a difference. I only know that it seemed to agree with my stomach better. They bathed me every morning in the same way, only after a while they did not have to work so slowly and cautiously. I could exercise more and more, from day to day, and with less and less fatigue, and I laughed to myself that father’s joke would prove something more than a joke; I was bound to undo all his nice work; and I knew he wouldn’t care, so that I could get well. After a while I could raise myself up and sit erect, and dig a little, first on one side and then on the other; and by the time my “six weeks” were up—and I told father so one day—I could dig a pretty good grave for myself, if they wanted to bury me; only, it wouldn’t be quite deep enough to hold me down—for I had actually raised myself to my feet, stood alone, and walked a few steps without help. On the eighth week I could walk about—would walk off a dozen steps, come back, sit down—perhaps lie down. The more I did, the more I could do—always taking “care not to exhaust myself—and the more I could eat; but I took even more care not to overeat than not to overwork; I found that the real thing was to eat little enough—not to see how much I could eat—so that I could increase the amount regularly, rather than to lose my appetite and eat nothing some days, or eat without an appetite, and next day eat enormously, perhaps, as mother used to; I wouldn’t have them “fix up” anything—I was afraid of being put back. I ate but twice a day, and sometimes my breakfast was nothing but fruit —two or three oranges or as many apples, or a huge slice of watermelon—this was food and drink, both. I wore the least possible weight of clothing—often removing my stockings as well as shoes, and going barefooted and bare-armed when the weather was very warm. I had lost all fear of taking cold, though I kept comfortable always—throwing off clothing when too warm, and putting it on, as any great change in the temperature made it necessary, but to the extent of my increasing strength I endeavored to keep warm by exercising my muscles. One day, after some months of self-treatment, and when it had become evident that I was really convalescent, I asked brother to call Dr. Osgood (the young doctor who refused to take my case). “Why, sis,” said he, “you are not in earnest?
“Yes, I am,” said I, “I want to tell him how to cure consumption! You tell him I want to see him, but don’t say what for.” He had been away somewhere, and had forgotten all about me, of course, but when brother spoke to him about me, he was astonished to find that I was alive. “It was amazing,” he said. “Yes, if there is any chance of saving(!) her I will call”—and he came. He expressed his pleasure at finding me so well, and I suppose he thought I had come to a point where I felt the need of his advice and a “tonic,” perhaps; but I just made him listen to the story of my self-cure, and asked him if he couldn’t advise others to do the same way, and so do his patients more good. He was inclined to be vexed, at first, but finally he laughed and said: Really, Miss B——, I have come here at your request, and you have prescribed for me, instead of I for you, and I thank you for it—will pay you for it, if you will name the price—but I could not practice in that way. Why, how many consumptives would act upon my advice, if it was of that character? How many indeed, would have the second visit from me, or recommend me to others? They would even denounce me to their friends—to everyone they saw, and I would have to go to digging in the ground myself, or leave for other parts. No, Miss B——, you learned the true secret, and you were fit to survive because you worked out your own salvation; you have taught me something— a valuable lesson, I may say, and one that I shall profit by as I have an opportunity, but we could never set up such a reform—one doctor, nor two, or three, alone—the time is not ripe for it, physicians are not ripe for it, and it can only come, if it is ever to come, by just such independent action as your case represents.
Today, almost a century later, that young doctor’s words ring with a bell-like clarity, as we realize that the progress that has been made in the care of tuberculosis has come about through the pioneering of such natural hygienists as Dr. Page. It is inevitable that the day will come, perhaps in another hundred years, more or less, when the members of the healing arts and lay people will realize that the primary answers to overcoming poor health and “conquering disease” lie in the simple precepts, first to remove cause, secondly to cleanse the body, third, to study (which will bring the realization that there is much we can learn about ourselves and we need not be “man the unknown”) and fourth to reap the benefit of our beginning to obey the laws of life—and to start really to live.
Pg 87
The voice of natural hygiene reaches out to us over the years; strike the bell where we may, the clarion call of a striving toward normalcy rings out loud and clear. In 1883, in Biddeford, Maine, Charles E. Page, M.D., writing about Air Baths, said,
With a view to exaltation of the condition of the entire organism, as well as simply that of the digestive and assimilative system—and in addition to the reform already suggested as to clothing, i.e., a reduction of the number and weight of garments habitually worn, when these have been superabundant— I would say to all classes, sick or well, that great advantage will be derived from habituating themselves to transient exposure of the entire surface of the body to the air. Often enough, we observe persons sitting heavily clad, in a warm room and close to the fire, and yet feeling “shivery” and sure of having “caught cold.” To throw off all clothes would banish all chills “instanter,” especially if the person begins to give himself a brisk hand rubbing. The skin is sweltered and is numb for want of circulation in the capillaries. In the case supposed the person has prevented a “cold.” “In place of dodging from his sweltering bed into his heavy day-clothing, the robust man will be far more likely to maintain his vigorous condition by doffing his night-shirt and indulging for the space of five minutes or so in brisk hand rubbing all over, however cold his sleeping room, and again on going to bed; while the delicate ones should with due caution, inaugurate the same system (some will power has to be exerted), but graduated as to temperature and duration, to their special conditions—advancing as their physical condition improves under its influence until they are no longer members of that immense army—the victims of “aerophobia.” … Set in practice in a rational manner this custom will never injure the most delicate person, but on the contrary will always prove beneficial. It will not bring the dead to life, nor indeed “cure” the moribund; it is nature herself, in very truth—and I have seen patients who were thought to be helplessly ill, begin to take on what seemed to be renewed life, largely through this use of fresh air, and the dismissal of the unnatural dread of it.
When Dr. Page wrote of the unnatural dread of fresh air at that time, he was talking not only about the general “public but particularly about his brethren in the medical field. Today, we take as a matter of course sleeping with the windows open, but there was a time not so long ago when fresh air was regarded as a dangerous enemy. Even today the fear of “night air,” lingers on, and we dread a “draft” as if it were a blast from the devil incarnate. How simple, sensible, and logical is this admonition to take air-baths. The advice that Dr. Page gave in 1883 is as valid today as it was then; no magic W-H-A-M is ever going to replace it. But the simple normal use of fresh air is not enough for the blind men who would and who do make “magic medicine” out of it.
“Page, Charles E., M.D., The Nature Cure, New York, Fowler and Wells, 1884”
Excerpt From
You Don’t Have to Be Sick
Jack Dunn Trop
This material may be protected by copyright.
Shelton, H. (1968). Health for the Millions. Youngstown, OH. National Health Association.
Pg 171
“Even as late as our grandfathers’ time, in spite of the mighty work accomplished by Graham, Trall, Jackson, Page, Oswald and a host of other crusaders for fresh air and ventilated bedrooms, most people slept with their bedrooms closed to exclude the “night air.” They seem not to have realized that “night air” and “day air” are the same air and that the air in the room at night is as much “night air” as the air outside, except that it is more foul.
“But, to make sure that no “night air,” damp air and cold air ever touched them to give them colds, La Grippe, bronchitis, pneumonia and rheumatism, they closed windows and doors, used curtains, screens, night caps and other means of excluding the air. Night air was simply bad and it did not have to be either damp or cold, as they excluded the air in summer and during droughts.
Excerpt From
Health for the Millions
Herbert M. Shelton
This material may be protected by copyright.
Shelton, H. (1934). The Science and Fine Art Fasting – The Hygienic System: Volume I. National Health Association, Youngstown, OH.
Pg 21
“Dr. Oswald, who was a contemporary of Dewey, refers to fasting as “the Graham starvation cure.” It is quite probable also that Doctors Page, Oswald, and Walter preceded Dewey and Tanner in the employment of fasting. Dr. Page’s book, published in 1883, recounts recoveries while fasting and urges fasting in many cases. Mr. Macfadden’s and Dr. Oswald’s Fasting Hydropathy and Exercise was published in 1900. These three men were all acquainted with the works of Dr. Jennings and were influenced much by him, frequently quoting him. I feel safe in assuming that they also received much from Trall and Graham.
“Laboratory confirmation of the benefits of fasting is not lacking; but it is not needed. Science is not confined to the laboratory and human observation is often as reliable in the field of practice as in that of experiment. Much experimental work with fasting, both in men and animals, has been done by approved laboratory men. Little attention has been given by these men to the value of fasting in “disease” conditions, but their work is of value to us in a general study of the subject before us.
Pg 27
“Fasting, as we employ the term, is voluntary and entire abstinence from all food except water. “Little driblet meals,” says Dr. Chas. E. Page, “are not fasting. There should not be a mouthful or sip of anything but water, a few swallows of which would be taken from time to time, according to desire.” We do not employ the word fasting to describe a diet of fruit juice, for example.
Pg 28
“Fasting is neither a “hunger cure” nor a “starvation cure,” as it is sometimes called. Fasting is not starving. The fasting person is not hungry, and fasting is not a method of treating or curing “disease.” Dr. Page says, “The term frequently applied—’starvation cure’—is both misleading and disheartening to the patient: the fact is he is both starved and poisoned by eating when the hope of digestion and assimilation is prohibited, as is, in great measure, the case in all acute attacks and more especially when there is nausea or lack of appetite. “Fasting is a rest—a physiological vacation. It is not an ordeal nor a penance. It is a house-cleaning measure which deserves to be better known and more widely used.
Pg 63
“FASTING BY THE INSANE
The insane commonly manifest a strong aversion to food and, unless forcibly fed, will often go for extended periods without eating. It is customary in institutions devoted to the care of the mentally ill, to force-feed such patients, often by very cruel means. This aversion to food by the insane is undoubtedly an instinctive move in the right direction. In his Natural Cure, pp. 140-143, Dr. Page presents a very interesting account of a patient that recovered normal mental health by fasting forty-one days, after other treatment had miserably failed. One case of insanity in a young man who came under my care refused food for thirty-nine days, resuming eating on the morning of the fortieth day of fasting, greatly improved in mental condition. I have used fasting in other cases of mental disease and have no doubt that fasting is distinctly beneficial and, I am convinced that when the insane patient refuses food, this is an instinctive measure designed to assist the body in its reconstructive work.
Pg 72
“I have had many people tell me that the forty days’ fast of Jesus was a miracle. It has also been asserted that the long fasts of Moses and Elijah were miracles.* Tanner’s two fasts, one of forty days and the other of forty-two days, are frequently referred to as “unusual.” Such fasts, of which there have been many, are often set down as historical oddities or eccentricities. They are thought of as isolated and extra-ordinary facts that have occurred from time to time, but as being without the limits of possibility for the average man or woman. Jesus or Tanner may have fasted for forty days and lived, and Tanner may have secured distinct benefits from his fast, but I could not go without food for even a day, is the statement of many when the fast is under discussion. As Dr. Page puts it in The Natural Cure, “It is commonly supposed that these are uncommon men; they are uncommon only in possessing a knowledge as to the power of the living organism to withstand abstinence from food, and in having the courage of their opinions.
Pg 79
“Human flesh,” says Dr. Page, “by absorption, constitutes a most appropriate diet in certain conditions of disease. The absorption and excretion of diseased tissue is, under some circumstances, the only work that nature can with safety undertake, and in these cases, no building up can be accomplished until a solid foundation is reached and the debris removed; and not then, unless while this good work is going on, the nutritive organs are given an opportunity to virtually renew themselves” (1883b, p. 73)
Pg 163
“These experiences caused me to do some effective thinking. The first question I asked myself was this: Am I doing right in employing an enervating measure in my care of my patients? I could not get an affirmative answer to this question, no matter how I tried. Then I ran my mind back over my studies of fasting among animals. The question came naturally to mind: If fasting animals, many of which fast for much longer periods than man can ever fast, do not need enemas, why does fasting man require them? I could find no logical reason why man required them while fasting. Then I reviewed the literature of fasting and I discovered that Jennings, Dewey, Tanner and others had not employed the enema. Cautiously, I began to test the no-enema plan. I soon became convinced of its superiority over the enema plan. I found Dr. Claunch rejecting the enema. I discovered that Dr. Page was not an advocate of its use. I had arrived at my conclusion the hard way, only to find that I was not alone.
Pg 211
“During the last illness of the actor, Joseph Jefferson, Dr. Chas. E. Page made the following memorandum from the published accounts of his illness:
April 16th: “Has not retained nourishment.”
April 20th: “The patient is better.”
April 20th: “Retained nourishment.”
April 21st: “More restless: condition less favorable.”
According to the published accounts, Mr. Jefferson, who was said to have had pneumonia and who was said to have suffered with gastritis for several months before developing pneumonia, had no desire for food. He was fed in spite of the lack of desire for food and no possibility of digesting and assimilating it. His illness followed an “attack of indigestion from an indiscretion in diet on a visit to a friend.” Forced feeding, alcohol and heart stimulants finished him off and it was announced that his “age was against him.” Was it age or feeding and drugging that killed him?
Pg 242
“Dull ache in the epigastrium, violent headache, irritability, restlessness, lassitude, drowsiness, faintness and a decreasing capacity for continuous effort—how like the effects that follow the missing of the accustomed cigar, pipe, cup of coffee or tea, glass of whiskey, or dose of morphine are these symptoms! How did Prof. Cannon miss their true significance? The “feeling of emptiness,” and the gnawing that he describes, are not accompaniments of hunger. Neither is the “dull pressing sensation” which he has left as the “central fact” of hunger, any part of the physiological demand for food, which we call hunger. These are both morbid sensations. “No person,” says Page, “feels faint upon passing a meal, or has a gnawing stomach, except it be occasioned by an irritated or unduly congested state of that organ. It is a sure proof of dyspepsia (using this term in its popular sense, as implying the condition of that organ). Strictly speaking the term is a synonym of indigestion“ (1883a, p. 28).”
Pg 248
“For over a hundred years Shew, Graham, Trall, Page, Dewey, Oswald, Haskell, Macfadden, Carrington, Eales, Tilden, Weger, Claunch, Shelton and hundreds of others, who have had extensive experience with fasting, have been calling attention to the fact that hunger is a mouth and throat sensaton rather than a stomach sensaton, but the professional physiologists have persisted in ignoring their work and their testimony and have accepted popular superstitions about the sensation of hunger and have “confirmed” these by limited experiments on sick men and women. Cannon, Pavlov, Carlson, etc., have all based their conclusions on inadequate data and on experiments that are too short to be conclusive.”
Pg 260
“Great emaciation is not a bar to fasting. I have fasted numerous very thin people. One man, an asthmatic, who was veritably “skin and bones” when reaching my institution, fasted seventeen days and became practically free of asthma of nine years’ standing. A subsequent fast completed his restoration. This man actually grew stronger during the fast. Indeed, in some cases of wasting “disease,” no amount and kind of feeding produces any improvement until a fast, or a greatly reduced diet (a starvation diet), has first been employed. Page, Rabagliati, Kieth, Nichols and others record many such cases. Many deaths in tuberculosis are the result of starvation from overfeeding.”
306
“Dr. Hazzard claimed the dubious credit of having introduced the enema practice into the procedure of fasting. Dewey rejected the enema up to the time of his death. Dr. Tanner also rejected it. So did Jennings and Page. Dr. Claunch did not employ it. I have not employed it for decades and find this more satisfactory than its use. Page (1883b) observed: “Tanner had no movement during his fast; Griscomb’s experience was similar, and Connolly, the consumptive, who fasted for forty-three days, had no movement for three weeks, and then the temporary looseness was occasioned by profuse water drinking, which in his case proved curative” (p. 112).”
Pg 318
“Dr. Chas. E. Page says: “Accustomed to distention from the bulky character of the old diet, if only a physiological ration of the pure and more nutritious food be swallowed, the stomach misses the stimulus of distention; time will be required (in some cases) for the stomach to remodel itself as regards size—unless a large proportion of fruit is used in conjunction with the cereals.” After the preliminary period of persistent hunger has been successfully passed, the stomach seems to rest content with less food. If the patient will control himself during this period, all will be well thereafter.
pg 341-2
“If fasting were instituted at the first sign of trouble, few acute diseases would ever become very severe and many of them would be so mild as to lead to the thought that the patient would not have been very sick any way. Unfortunately, it is the custom to continue eating when symptoms appear. As Dr. Page ably put it, “Nearly all patients continue eating regularly, until food becomes actually disagreeable, even loathsome, often; and, after this, every effort is exhausted to produce some toothsome compound to ‘tempt the appetite.’ Furthermore, and often worst of all, after the entire failure of this program, the patient can, and usually does, take to gruel or some sort of ‘extract,’ which he can drink by holding his breath. All this tends to aggravate the acute symptoms, and to fasten the disease in a chronic form upon the rheumatic patient, or to insure rheumatic fever; and the same principle holds in nearly all acute disorders, it is well to remember” (1883b, p. 146).
Page also says; “There is neither pleasure nor nourishment in forced feeding—only pain, poisoning and starving. The fasting cure universally and rationally applied, would save thousands of lives every year. For example, there would be practically no ‘typhoid fever,’ as all fevers would be aborted in a few days of stomach rest; and never a death or prolonged illness from whooping-cough, which is always a stomach cough from inflammation of that organ. In my busy practice of forty years, no fever has developed into ‘typhoid;’ nor has there been any whooping beyond a few days, and never a death.”
pg 346
“RHEUMATISM
Page quotes Casey A. Wood, M.D., Professor of Chemistry in the Medical Department of Bishop’s College, Montreal, in an article in the Canada Medical Record, entitled “Starvation in the treatment of Acute Articular Rheumatism,” as giving the “history of seven cases where the patients were speedily restored to health by simply abstaining from food from four to eight days, and he says he could have given the history of forty more from his own practice.” No drugs were used.”
“In no case did this treatment fail.” The cases reported “included men and women of different ages, temperaments, occupations, and social positions.” Dr. Wood says: “From the quick and almost invariably good results to be obtained by simple abstinence from food, I am inclined to the idea that rheumatism is, after all, only a phase of indigestion.” Dr. Page adds: “In chronic rheumatism he obtained less positive results, but did not venture to try fasts of longer duration.” Dr. Wood concludes by saying that “this treatment, obviating as it does, almost entirely, danger of cardiac complications, will be bound to realize all that has been claimed for it—a simple, reliable remedy for a disease that has long baffled the physician’s skill.”
Pg 352
“Great numbers of the chronic sufferers who habitually over-eat are very thin and grow progressively thinner with the passage of time. Indeed, one frequently hears them remark: “the more I eat the thinner I get.” How true it is that they are slowly starving from over-consumption of food which they cannot digest. Dr. Dewey frequently speaks of the “starvation of over-feeding.” Dr. King-Chambers spoke of the “starvation of over-repletion.” Drs. Page and Rabagliati use similar expressions. Fasting literature is full of records of cases that had been suffering while surfeiting and who recovered health through fasting, regaining their normal weight when eating was resumed.”
Excerpt From
The Science and Fine Art of Fasting
Herbert M. Shelton
This material may be protected by copyright.
Shelton, H. (1935). The Science and Fine Art of Food and Nutrition – The Hygienic System: Volume II. National Health Association, Youngstown, OH.
Pg 17-18
“In his Hydropathic Encyclopedia, 1851, Dr. Trall declared to the world that all fresh fruits and green vegetables are antiscorbutic (opposed to the development of scurvy). Trall soon joined Graham in his crusade for vegetables and fruits and whole grain bread and against meat, eggs, milk, white bread, wines, narcotics, etc. Graham died in 1851. Trall carried on until his death in 1879. By this time the workers were many. Dr. Jennings joined them early in Graham’s crusade. After Dr. Trall’s death, Drs. Page and Densmore added to our fund of knowledge about trophology (the science of food that studies the impact of the alimentary factor on the condition of a human body).
“These “biochemists” discovered that cabbage, lettuce, celery, tomatoes, apples, oranges, etc., are really valuable foods. Their discovery so shocked and surprised the medical world that it completely forgot that the “faddists” had been eating these foods for a long time and had declared them to be superior to white flour, salt bacon, pigs knuckles, sausage, lard pies and coffee. It was really a remarkable discovery – all they now need to do is to become “faddists” with the rest of us and make use of the things Graham, Trall, Alcott, Densmore, Page, Oswald, Kuhne, Lahmann, Berg, etc., had long taught.
Pg 81
“A few teaspoonfuls of olive oil a day should suffice to supply a man with all the food (heat units) he requires, but everyone nowadays knows that man cannot live on such a diet. The great value of lettuce is now everywhere recognized. Fruits and vegetables, formerly almost valueless, except in the estimation of a few cranks like Graham, Trall, Densmore, Page and Tilden, are coming to be more and more recognized for what they are – man’s best food. It is even asserted on experimental evidence that green foods are absolutely necessary.
Pg 227
“How Much Shall We Eat?
CHAPTER XXIV
The question of how much to eat has engaged the attention of many able men and women, but the question has not been answered. The so-called scientists have figured out our requirements in calories. This I have already shown to be a fallacy. Most people advocate eating all the appetite calls for. But appetite is a creature of habit and can be trained to be satisfied with little food or to demand enormous quantities. The business of creating gluttonous appetites begins in infancy when infants are stuffed day and night. Dr. Page proved that an infant may be taught to guzzle day and night, or to content itself with two to four meals a day.”
Pg 291
“Uncooked fruits, nuts, vegetables and whole grains were not merely “protective” foods to Graham, Trall, Allcott, Densmore, Page and others; they were nutritive; indeed they represented the best and highest form of nutritive material. Dr. Trall proclaimed (1860) all fruits and vegetables to be protective, by which he did not intend to detract from their nutritive qualities. The world has been a long time discovering what Graham knew – namely, that cooking impairs or destroys the protective and nutritive values of foods.
Pg 316
“Dr. Page says, “Pigeons, chickens and mice will flourish on Graham (whole wheat) flour, but all will die within three weeks on white flour.” A colony of mice fed on the best grade of white flour will all develop constipation in three days and die within a month. An equal number fed on whole wheat flour will flourish and gain weight.”
Pg 412
“Dr. Page said: “In the absence of particular circumstances compelling premature weaning, I believe that the mother’s milk providing the mother be in fair health and the babe evidently thriving on her milk, is the best food for the infant during the first eighteen months, and even until the end of the second year.”
Pg 437
“Dr. Page says: “The woman who lacks a reliable appetite for any sort of plain wholesome food, is not a well woman; if she indulges in that which is unwholesome, she cannot maintain good health; if she is overfed, abnormally fat and plethoric, she is a sick woman; and such mothers cannot supply a perfect food for the nursing child.” “Much sloppy food, hot drinks, profuse drinking between meals to force the milk,’ are injurious to both the mother and child. Much animal food is not advisable either in winter or summer, and in the latter season especially should be avoided altogether.” “Nausea, lack of appetite, fitful appetite, ‘gnawing’ at the stomach – the latter so generally mistaken for a demand for food – all result from excess or the use of unwholesome food or condiments.
Pg 444 -446
“Dr. Page was particularly bitter against the practice of feeding starches to infants. “Farina, corn-starch, fine flour, and refined sugar,” he declared, “are the fashionable materials of the infant dietary; but a worse selection could hardly be made.” He cautioned against the injury to the vital organs resulting from “prematurely feeding the infant on even the best selected articles of the general table,” and added: “It is not uncommon for infants to be given cakes and candies and even pork, fried fish, cabbage, ham, potatoes, etc., while the teeth are blamed for the ensuing gastro-intestinal disorders.”
“It will not do to feed mashed potatoes, corn meal mush, farina, and the like to toothless infants, and imagine that because these things can be swallowed without chewing, the problem is solved. They are also swallowed without being insalivated and are eaten by one whose digestive juices are ill adapted to starch digestion.
The fact that Nature makes no provisions for the digestion of starches before full dentition, should be sufficient evidence that she does not intend it to form any part of the infant’s diet. Before the teeth are fully developed the saliva of the infant contains a mere trace of ptyalin, the digestive ferment or enzyme that converts starch into sugar. There is just enough of this ptyalin present in the saliva to convert milk sugar into dextrose. It is this almost total absence of starch-splitting enzymes from the digestive juices of the infant that accounts for the great amount of digestive disorders which result from feeding starch foods to infants. When starch digestion is impossible, starch fermentation is inevitable. This poisons the baby.”
“If we limit the following remarks of Page’s to the milk from a healthy, well nourished mother, he is eternally right. He says: “Milk is the food for babies and contains all of the elements necessary to make teeth, and until they are made, it should continue to be the sole food. It is not enough that two or three or a half dozen teeth have come through, that they should be expected to do any part of a grown child’s work.
“Upon no consideration,” says Dr. Page, “should any of the farinaceous or starchy articles be added until the mouth bristles with teeth; then it may be justly considered that he can handle something of the adult diet.”
447
“Dr. Page says:– “The farmer who wants to raise the best possible animal from the calf, lets the creature suckle in the morning at milking-time, and again, at night. He is wise enough to feed his calf only twice and the result is, the calf thrives from birth, and sickness is unknown.”
Pg 448
“Happily such gross feeding has disappeared among the better informed classes with a consequent improvement in the health of our babies. But it is still all too true that babies are greatly overfed and are frequently dosed. There are no reasons for doubting that dyspepsia which Page calls “the parent of nearly all our ills,” is the result of overfeeding in infancy, confirmed by continued over-indulgence through life.
However well intentioned mothers and nurses may be, the almost universal custom of constantly feeding infants is extremely cruel, and we may be sure that were such mothers and nurses compelled to take food as often and in the same excessive quantities that it is forced upon the baby, night and day, the abuse would soon be ended. The cruelty of the practice would soon be apparent.
Pg 449
“Long prior to this time, however, Dr. Page and others had proven that three meals a day are enough for a baby. Asserting that no infant can thrive unless well fed and assuming that a well fed baby is one that secures the minimum amount of suitable food that will suffice to produce a comfortable, happy, thriving baby, with body and limbs well-rounded with flesh, not fat, and whose growth shall be uniform throughout its whole life, and until the frame is fully developed, he declared: “It is my belief, verified by experience in the case of my own infant, and from other substantial proof, that three meals a day, with sufficient restriction at each, will accomplish this end, and are all that should be permitted from birth, and the intervals should be at least five or six hours between meals.
Pg 457
“FEEDING THE MILK
“All milk-eating creatures are and should be sucklings,” says Dr. Page. Quite right! Milk should never be drunk like water. Nature teaches us how milk should be taken. So long as your child is to have milk, up to five or six years, give it to him or her from a bottle and nipple. This will insure thorough insalivation and prevent the child from gulping it down.”
Pg 462
“Artificial infant foods are undesirable. Dr. Robert McCarrison of England, says that the “seeds” of diseases that inevitably kill their victims in middle life are often introduced into the body with the first bottle of cow’s milk or artificial baby food – and he is not referring to germs, either. Dr. Page condemned the various artificial foods, advertised as “substitutes for mother’s milk” and, although, “many infants manage to subsist on them, and in many cases thrive on them,” he did not consider that such foods are good.”
Pg 463
“SUMMER FEEDING
Hot weather is accused of having much to do with the fearful slaughter of the human animal – a distinctly tropical animal and certainly well adapted to a hot climate.
Blaming hot weather for certain “diseases peculiar to children” and for the deaths in these conditions, is a very misleading way of saying, as Page puts it, that, “the excess of food that can be tolerated under the tonic and antiseptic influence of cold weather, engenders disease during the heated term.”
Hot weather favors decomposition, cold weather retards it. But, on the whole, we are hurt almost, if not quite as much by food excess in the winter as in summer. We are more likely to have bowel diseases in summer, respiratory diseases in winter–this is the chief difference.”
Excerpt From
The Science and Fine Art of Food and Nutrition
Herbert M. Shelton
This material may be protected by copyright.
Shelton, H. (1934). The Science and Fine Art of Natural Hygiene – The Hygeientic System: Volume I. National Health Association, Youngstown, OH.
Pg 15
“In his How Nature Cures, Dr. Densmore, repeatedly refers to hygienists and “hygienic physicians who use no medicine whatever,” and refers to Hygienists as “Physicians of the reform school.” Dr. Page, who was born in 1840; in his True Health Art (1906) poses “genuine hygienic treatment” opposite that of the “anti-Naturalists” and defines the “hygienic physician” as one who “knows how to apply all known hygienic agencies,” and speaks of the necessity of “having the hygienic instead of the unhygienic physician in attendance” upon the sick.”
Pg 61
“Faith is listed as an element of Hygiene by Jennings, Graham, Alcott, Trall, Jackson, Walter, Page and other early Hygienists. When all is said and approved of, there remains a place in the life of man for faith. Indeed, the fact that man has the power of faith and has always exercised it, even though not always wisely, is justification for faith. All of man’s powers are good when rightly used and, as faith is native to the human mind, it is an integral and necessary part of human life. But faith without skepticism (which is also native to the human mind) tends to degenerate into credulity and this is what we see happen in the lives of most of the people around us.”
Pg 164
SLEEPLESSNESS – INSOMNIA
“Sleeplessness declares Page, “is often referred to as a cause of insanity, but it would be much nearer the truth to say that insanity causes sleeplessness.”
“To attack insomnia as a disease instead of a symptom, is sure to result in discomfiture, in the great majority of cases and is in every instance unsound in principle. A man is wakeful at night because under his present physical condition he ought to be–just as in diarrhea, the looseness is doing its work of cure. Let him know that sleeplessness is an analogue of pain, and he will, or may, bear it philosophically, and thus tend to its removal.”
Pg 168
“When Graham began his crusade, homes were simply not ventilated at night. Thanks to his work and to that of Trall, Densmore, Page, Oswald and others, most people of today open their bedroom windows, even in winter. Not so our fathers and grandfathers. Even on sweltering summer nights the victims of aerophobia excluded the “sweet south wind, blessed by all creatures that draw the breath of life,” from their rooms. Night-air was a deadly foe to life and health.”
Pg 181
“Dr. Trall says: “Were human beings in all other respects to adapt themselves to the laws of their organization, and were they in all their voluntary habits in relation to eating, drinking, clothing, exercise, and temperature, to conform strictly to the laws of hygiene, I do not know that there would be any physiological necessity or utility in bathing at all.” Dr. Page agrees with this, saying: “The less clothing one wears, the less essential a daily bath becomes, and the less time necessary to devote to it. At the same time there is an increased ability to withstand exposure to wet or cold, whether of the bath, an involuntary ducking, or however caused.”
Bathing: Keep your body clean but do not indulge in too frequent and too prolonged bathing. Do not stay in the water and soak for a long time. Man is neither fish nor amphibian. He is a land mammal. To get clean, simple washing in plain water, at a moderate temperature (luke warm or slightly cool–not hot or cold), is sufficient. Get into the tub or under the shower and quickly wash the body in the same manner that you wash your face. Stay in the water only long enough to cleanse the body. Get out as quickly as possible and dry off with a coarse towel, vigorously rubbing the body with this. Staying in the water too long enervates through stimulation.”
Pg 189
“As a health impairing agent dress and clothing easily take a place in the front ranks. Man is naturally a nude animal and his body needs and should have the daily contact with the sun and air that it received before man learned to cover himself. The air alone, when playing upon the body, occasions increased metabolism. Let us briefly state the greater evils of clothing:
1.They exclude the sun and air from the body.
2.They bind the excretions of the body upon it and necessitate too frequent bathing. Clothing causes us to literally wallow in our own excretions.”
“3.They weaken the powers of the skin and cripple its power to quickly adapt itself to weather changes. Trall, Rausse, Oswald, Page, Kuhne, Just, Macfadden and others have proclaimed, for the past hundred years, that exposure of the nude body to the weather, during both winter and summer, does not cause colds. The medical profession has long scoffed at this “extremist” view of things, but will be forced, by experience, to accept it as true.
4.They interfere more or less with freedom of movement and hamper body development.
5.Tight bands, garters, corsets, etc., interfere both with movement and with circulation and, also, cramp the internal organs. Corsets crowd the internal organs out of place and deform the chest, abdomen and hips; brassiers cramp and injure the breasts compressing them and producing a flabbiness in them that is wholly unnatural.”
“6.Shoes are the cause of about ninety percent of our foot troubles. Ill-fitting stockings contribute to these troubles also. Shoes are more properly designated sweat boxes. High heels, narrow, pointed toes, curved inner lines, etc., are especially injurious. They also interfere with freedom in walking.
7.Clothes tend to create an air of mystery and one of shame about the body. They are potent factors in producing and maintaining prudery.
8.Clothes help to produce and maintain licentiousness and immorality. Instead of being aids to chastity, morality and modesty, they are hindrances.
By shutting out from the body, the air and sunshine; by creating an unclean body; by necessitating too frequent bathing; by restricting the movements of the body; by interfering with circulation; by cramping the organs of the body; by inducing prudery and licentiousness; by weakening the skin and limiting its resistance to environment; and by lessening the adaptive powers of the skin; clothes are distinctly evil and disease producing.
Pg 250
“Dr. Page, who opposed the employment of laxatives, cathartics, enemas, laxative foods, etc., for the purpose of “curing constipation,” saying that if there has been no action for two, three or even four days, it need occasion no alarm, and the novice will be surprised to see how natural a movement will finally reward his or her patience in awaiting her call, instead of badgering her into unusual activity, declares: “A good rule for many who suffer tortures of mind because of constipation would be: mind your own business and let your bowels mind theirs. Strive not to have movements, but rather to deserve them. That is, attend to the general health by living hygienically, and the bowels, if given regular opportunity, move when there is anything to move for.”
Pg 251
“Somewhere in his Lectures on the Science of Human Life, Sylvester Graham recounted a case, taken from the medical literature of the time, of an English general who did not have a bowel movement for a period of about 30 years–vomiting the undigested residue of his meal a few hours after eating each day. In my own practice I have seen hundreds of patients grow daily better while waiting for from three to fifty-three days for their bowel to move. Dr. Jennings, Dr. Page, Dr. Claunch, and others have had similiar experiences.”
Pg 294 -295
“Dr. Page says: “Babies are often tortured by too many and too tight-fitting garments, through the ignorance or carelessness of their attendants, or simply to gratify a mother’s silly pride, and are treated in all respects, in many cases, more like a doll in the hands of a make-believe mother, than like a sensitive little human being entitled to every possible comfort, in the free use of the developing body, limbs, muscles and organs.”
“Babies should be placed on their abdomen from the day of birth. In this way they develop their back, neck, arms and legs much more rapidly than when lying on their back. This is Dr. Page’s method and is the best exercise of which I know for infants.
Pg 297
“The best exercise in the world for the baby is to place it face down on the bed or palate and let it work. This is Dr. Page’s method. Laying on its back, its back and neck muscles are never exercised, while they are overheated. The back, neck, arm and legs get the best form of exercise when the baby is face down. It develops a strong neck and back and sturdy arms and legs. Place them on their faces from the day of birth. They will be better babies for it.
Baby needs fresh air and sunshine from the beginning. As it grows let it live much in the open air; let it play, sing, shout and laugh. Growth is the principle thing. This should not be repressed nor fettered. If you would lay deeply and firmly in your child’s constitution the foundations of a vigorous and beautiful manhood or womanhood, you must secure to it all of the essentials of healthy growth and carefully protect it from all deleterious influences. The greatest evil that can come into your child’s life is the poison-dispensing physician. Carefully guard your child against him and all that he stands for.”
Pg 318
“Among professional men of his time, Dr. Jennings made, so far as I can find any record, but one convert. Dr. William Alcott, of Boston, became an advocate of the Jennings theories and practices and rejected those of the hydropaths. His work did greatly influence Trall, Jackson and such successors as Walter, Page, Oswald, and a few other men. Dr. Jennings was not a crusader, a fact that was very unfortunate for the early days of the Hygienic movement. If he had promulgated his views and practices with greater ardor and attacked the water cure system with more force, many mistakes of the early Hygienists may conceivably have been avoided. For, it must be said in all candor, that among the early Hygienists Jennings was the only one whose practice was strictly Hygienic, unless that of Alcott became so. In fact many of Trall’s graduates used “a little medicine,” being unable to get completely away from the drugging practice.”
Pg 324
Dr. Charles E. Page was born in Norridgewalk, Me., February 23, 1840. He entered upon the study of medicine before the Civil (?) War, but his studies were cut short by his entry into the Army. In 1879 he entered the Eclectic Medical College in New York City. He did not long remain an eclectic, for, almost immediately after graduation we find him in the ranks of the Hygienists where he remained throughout an active and busy practice. He practiced in the city of Boston for more than thirty years and retired from active practice a few years before his death, at the age of 85, at 20 Pearl St., Melrose Highlands, Mass., November 24, 1925. His many contributions to the medical journals of New England helped to educate the physicians of that section, while his great number of contributions to Physical Culture, The Stuffed Club, and various other health magazines and anti-vaccination periodicals have exerted great influence.
Pg 326
“It seems that few, if any medical men ever get away from the drugging practice without going through the bread-pill and colored water stage. Jennings and Page both traversed this road, Trall going by way of the “water cure.” It is unfortunate that most medical men remain in this stage and never learn that all forms of make-believe medication receive credit for recoveries and that this prevents the patient and family from really learning the truth about disease and the many “curing” systems.”
“Tilden finally gave up the placebo practice and learned to rely upon Hygiene. Although he most often refers to his work as the “toxemia philosophy,” and the “toxemia system,” he does, more than once, refer to it as Hygienic. He was a student of Trall and of Page with whom he was on the friendliest of terms. An interesting sidelight on the animus that still exists towards those who step out of the ancient medical pattern is contained in the fact that when Who’s Who was first published, it contained Tilden’s pedigree, but thereafter dropped him from the list of worthwhile citizens. To compensate for this, however, Morris Fishbein, while still the official mouthpiece of the American Medical Association (allopathic), included him in his Blue Book of quacks and quackeries. Fishbein also influenced public libraries so that they refused to put Tilden’s books on their lending lists. Fishbein was a petty mountebank who was engaged by the allopathic profession to hunt medical heretics. He was a modern Torquemada.”
Pg 335
“About the close of the century, Albert Turner, a friend of Trall, started Health Culture magazine, which, for years was a Hygienic publication. About this time, also, Bernarr Macfadden started Physical Culture, which, at first, was largely Hygienic and was regularly contributed to by several of Trall’s graduates, by Dr. Chas. E. Page and Dr. Felix Oswald. At this time also, Dr. Tilden started his Stuffed Club the name of which was later changed to Philosophy of Health. Selling this magazine to Dr. Arthur Vos about 1923, he later started Dr. Tilden’s Health Review and Critique, which he continued to issue monthly until his death. Mrs. Tilden completed the 1940 vol. of this magazine with material Dr. Tilden had left behind, and suspended its publication at the end of the year 1940. At the present time the only Hygienic magazine published in America is Dr. Shelton’s Hygienic Review, which has been published monthly since its first issue in September 1939. The movement has not been without a publication since the founding of the Graham Journal, during the more than a hundred and twenty years since it was launched. Although there was an extended period of near inactivity, there was never a time, from its origin to the present, when there was not activity in the ranks of Hygiene.”
“An extensive bibliography of Hygiene is given in the text of these volumes and it is not deemed necessary to reproduce it here. The most prolific Hygienic writers have been Graham, Alcott, Trall, Nichols, Walter, Tilden and, if I may be permitted to place my own name in this list, Shelton. Jennings, Page, Dodds, Oswald, Densmore, Carrington and Weger, have contributed valuable volumes to the literature of Hygiene. Of this list, Carrington and the present author are the only ones now living. Valuable contributions to Hygiene have been made by men and women who have never been associated with the Hygienic movement and have not been Hygienists. Among these are Dewey, Tanner, Hazzard and Moras of this country, Rabagliatti (England), Berg (Sweden), Lahmann (Germany), and Reinheimer (England). It must be added that Hygiene is confirmed by every genuine discovery in physiology and biology.”
Excerpt From
The Science and Fine Art of Natural Hygiene
Herbert M. Shelton
This material may be protected by copyright.
Shelton, Herbert. (1964). Fasting Can Save Your Life. Youngstown. National Health Association.
Pg 40
“How often do we read that some notable patient is now “able to take nourishment” only to have the next report state that the patient is worse? This is such a common occurrence that it is difficult to understand why the connection between the ill-advised feeding and the subsequent deterioration of the patient’s condition is not quickly discerned. One notable example out of the past is the case of the world-famed actor, Joseph Jefferson, during whose last illness, Dr. Charles E. Page made the following memorandum from the published accounts of his illness:”
“April 16th: Has not retained nourishment.
April 20th: The patient is better.
April 20th: Retained nourishment.
April 21st: More restless: condition less favorable.”
Mr. Jefferson had pneumonia, a disease in which it is especially important not to eat. Further he had suffered with gastritis for several months before developing the pneumonia. His illness was at first described as an “attack of indigestion from an indiscretion in diet on a visit to a friend.” During the pneumonia, he had no desire for food, and there was no possibility of digesting and assimilating it, but he was fed in spite of these circumstances. Forced feeding, alcohol and heart stimulants followed. After his death, it was announced that “his age was against him.”
Pg 49-50
“There are varying degrees of inability to appropriate food in the various states of impaired health, and in all of these, a period of abstinence will hasten recovery. One should not wait until one is suffering with serious disease before instituting remedial measures. Take care of the small illnesses at the right time and in the right way and the more serious illnesses will not evolve. It is unfortunately true, as Dr. Charles E. Page, who lived in Melrose, Mass. and was an outstanding Hygienist, says, that “nearly all patients continue eating regularly, until food becomes actually disagreeable, even loathsome, often; and after this, every effort is exhausted to produce some toothsome compound to tempt the appetite. Furthermore, and often worst of all, after the entire failure of this program, the patient can, and usually does, take some gruel or some sort of ‘extract’ which he can drink by holding his breath. All this tends to aggravate the acute symptoms, and to fasten the disease in the chronic form upon the rheumatic patient, or to insure rheumatic fever; and the same principle holds in nearly all acute disorders, it is well to remember.”
“Fasting is a preventive program in that it initiates the cleansing process before serious developments have occurred. Fasting is used successfully in many cases of serious chronic illnesses—in advanced stages—and this will be explained later. But certainly it is wise to “nip in the bud” all such developments rather than to wait until the trouble has become formidable before doing anything about it. A great number of those who are reading this book are already in advanced stages of disease and they will desire to know what they can expect from a judicious fast. Much of this book will be devoted to answering such questions for them. At this point, it is only essential that I say that, while fasting can save many lives it is too much to expect it to save all lives without respect to the condition of the patient at the time the fast is undergone.
Dr. Page also says: “There is neither pleasure nor nourishment in forced feeding, only pain, poisoning and starving. The fasting cure universally and rationally applied, would save thousands of lives every year.”
“Dr. Page further urges the immediate launching of a fast wherever indicated, emphasizing that in serious cases, “plenty of good food” as the saying goes, can kill far more quickly than it can benefit.
The question, when to fast, is answered: When the need arises, as quickly as can be arranged, under advice, and without great expectations of immediate miraculous developments, instant recovery, or overnight slenderizing to sylph-like proportions.”
Excerpt From
Fasting Can Save Your Life
Herbert M. Shelton
This material may be protected by copyright.
Graham, S., Trall. R., Shelton, H. (2009) The Greatest Health Discovery. Youngstown, OH. National Health Association.
Pg 18
“What are commonly called diseases are in reality ‘cures,’ and the common practice, with drug doctors, of ‘controlling the symptoms,’ is like answering the cries and gesticulations of a drowning man with a knock on the head.”
Pg 32
“Among professional men of his time, Dr. Jennings seems to have made but one convert. Dr. William Alcott of Boston became an advocate of the Jennings’ theories and practices and rejected those of the hydropaths. Jennings’ work did greatly influence such professional men as Drs. Trall, James Jackson and successors in the field of natural hygiene such as Robert Walter, Charles Page, Felix Oswald. Dr. Jennings, unfortunately, was not a crusader, a fact that was very harmful to the early days of the Hygienic Movement. Had he promulgated his views and practices with greater ardor and attacked the water cure system with more force, many mistakes of the early Hygienists may have conceivably been avoided.
Pg 38
“Dr. Jennings joined them early in the crusade. After Dr. Trall’s death in 1877, Drs. Page and Densmore added to our fund of knowledge about dietary science.”
Pg 57
“Charles E. Page, M.D.”
“Dr. Charles E. Page was born in Norridgewalk, Maine, February 23, 1840. He entered upon the study of medicine before the Civil War, but his studies were cut short by his entry into the army. In 1879 he entered the Eclectic Medical College in New York City. He did not long remain an eclectic for almost immediately after graduation, we find him in the ranks of the Hygienists where he remained throughout the rest of his practicing years. He practiced in Boston for more than thirty years and retired a few years before his death at Highlands, Massachusetts in 1925 at the age of 85. His many contributions to the medical journals of New England helped to educate the physicians of that section, while his numerous writings in Physical culture, The Stuffed Club and various other health magazines and anti-vaccination periodicals have exerted great influence. Among his books are The Natural Cure (1883), How To Feed the Baby (1882).”
Pg 61
“Among the best known of Dr. Tilden’s many books are:Diseases of Women and Easy Childbirth; Toxemia Explained; Tilden Cook Book; Children: Their Health and Happiness; Constipation; Cholera Infantum; Criticisms of the Practice of Medicine (2 vols.); Impaired Health (2 vols.); Appendicitis; The Pocket Dietician: Food (2 vols.); Typhoid Fever; Venereal Disease. Dr. Tilden was of the opinion that babies are usually fed too often and too much, thus laying the foundation for a later chronic toxemia. In this he agreed with Dr. Charles Page.”
Excerpt From
The Greatest Health Discovery
Sylvester Graham, Russell T. Trall, and Herbert M. Shelton
This material may be protected by copyright.
Shelton, Herbert. (1968). Natural Hygiene: The Pristine Way of Life Youngstown, OH. National Health Association.
Pg 147
“Jennings and Graham did not discuss crises and must have thought very little of them. Alcott, also, ignores their supposed need. I once asked Dr. Tilden what he thought of this assumed need for crises and he replied that, under rational care, they are of rare development. Trall discussed, but did not stress them. Walter and Page never stressed them. In general, I think it correct to say that Hygienists were not enamored by the doctrine that critical actions are always essential to recovery from chronic disease.
Dr. James Caleb Jackson was a notable exception to this rule. He laid great stress upon crises and the need for them. In the June 1857 issue of the Journal, he not only elevates water-cure processes to top rank in the care of the sick, but stresses the need for crises in the process of recovery. He discusses this subject at some length in his controversy with the allopaths, these having severely criticized and condemned the crisis-inducing practice. “Declaring crises to be “harbingers of redemption,” he proceeds to explain the why and wherefores of crises. He explained that medical men see no such crises in their practice because their modes of treatment are such that the life forces must war against them, whereas his methods of care (chiefly hydropathic) were most gratefully received by the body.”
In his Hydropathic Encyclopedia, 1851, Dr. Trall declared to the world that all fresh fruits and green vegetables are antiscorbutic (opposed to the development of scurvy). Trall soon joined Graham in his crusade for vegetables and fruits and whole grain bread and against meat, eggs, milk, white bread, wines, narcotics, etc. Graham died in 1851. Trall carried on until his death in 1879. By this time the workers were many. Dr. Jennings joined them early in Graham’s crusade. After Dr. Trall’s death, Drs. Page and Densmore added to our fund of knowledge about trophology (the science of food that studies the impact of the alimentary factor on the condition of a human body).
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