Dewey Edward Hooker
The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure
I conclude these cases with an illustration. Think of all this enforced feeding, of the doses to relieve, of the wasting of brain power, and compare with the following illustration, in which case no food was taken for thirty-six days, and yet it was possible for the patient to be about during the greater part of the time.
Note. – In this case severe indigestion and nervous troubles and almost daily headaches had been a torture for years. On the morning of the thirty-sixth day, on which the photograph was taken, a visit to the dentist for the extraction of a tooth revealed no fear, as had formerly been the case. Eating was resumed on the thirty-eighth day with no inconvenience. Since then (over six months ago) no trace of the former troubles has reappeared. Loss of weight about twenty pounds.
V
"Physician, heal thyself!" There is a world of sarcasm in these three words; for about the only advantage the physician has over the laity is that he can do his own dosing. As a general fact, he does no more to prevent bodily ailings than other people, and is just as liable to become the victim of bad habits.
It is my impression that, in proportion, as many physicians become the slaves of tobacco, opium in some form, and alcoholics as are to be found in any other class of people; they are quite as likely to be the victims of various chronic ailings as other people, and with equal impotency to relieve. Every day I see physicians going to the homes of the sick with cigars on fire, signals of the brain system in distress undergoing the lullaby of nicotine; going into rooms where the purest air of heaven ought to prevail, as animated tobacco-signs.
Where is there virtue in this world that is of any practical good whose vital force is not to be found in example rather than in precept? Who has more need to go into the room of the sick with the purest breath, the cleanest tongue, the brightest eyes, the purest complexion, the most radiant countenance, and with a soul free from the bonds of ailings or habits that offend and disable, than the physician? Where is the logic of employing the sick to feed the sick? Is not that a sick doctor whose nerves are so full of plaints as to need the frequent soothings only found in a cigar, that also sears the nerves of taste? Is he not very sick when those nerves require the stronger alcoholic?
There is contagion in good health and sound morals, when daily illustrated, no less than in courage and fear. No physician can be at his best in the rooms of the sick if he be under any bondage from disease or habit.
"Physician, heal thyself!" Physician, how does it happen that you have need to be healed, and of what worth are you if you can neither prevent disease nor cure yourself with your dosings? What availeth it to a man to talk righteously when virtue is not in him?
Ailings, habits blunt all the special senses and the finer instincts and tastes, and impair the power to reason clearly, to infer correctly, to conclude wisely. Only the well have that hopefulness that comes from power in reserve, power that is not wasted through acquired disease and acquired habits. The contagion of health is a power no less than courage or fear.
That man, self-poised, void of fear, General Grant, crushed the Rebellion with a single sentence, "I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." That sentence made every man in his army a Grant in courage and confidence. Grant in his prime could puff his cigar while commanding all the armies of his country; but the cigar ultimately destroyed his life, and there was no physician to interpose to prevent one of the most torturing of deaths.
Where is the logic of the sick trying to heal the sick? This question will be more frequently asked in that time to come when the drug-store annex to the sick-room will be much smaller than is now thought necessary.
Human expression is studied in the rooms of the sick as nowhere else; and if the lines are not obscured by the fogs and clouds of disease the signs can be much more clearly distinguished.
A man is now under my care whose soul is of the largest mould, and who is so supremely endowed by reason of intellect, varied tastes and acquirements, as to make life on earth well worth living. His long chronic local ailment has not impaired his power to read me for signs of hope as it seems to me I have never been read before; and never before have I so felt the need to enter a room of the sick with a larger stock of general health. For the time I seem to him to be holding before his eyes the keys of life or death.
The physician should be able to go into the room of the sick to see with clearest vision whatever is revealed to the natural eye; and no less to see with eyes of understanding that he may be an interpreter of conditions that indicate recovery or death. He is the historian of disease, and therefore before he can write he must see clearly all that can be known about the process of cure as revealed by symptoms.
The eye is at its best only in perfect health no less than the reason, the judgment, and the spirits. A few years ago a drouth of many weeks occurred; in some meadows and pastures the grass seemed dead, beyond the possibility of growth. Every shade of the green had departed; but warm rains came, and in a few days there was a green carpet plush-like in its softness and delicacy.
So the progress of cure may be read on the tongue, on the skin, in the eyes, where there are both eyesight and insight to see and to study.
VI
For many years I entered the rooms of the sick a sick man myself; I was the victim of that monster of hydraheads, dyspepsia, or, to call it by a more modern title, indigestion.
In my later teens my stomach began seriously to complain over its tasks, and a pint of the essence of bitterness was procured to restore it to power. My mouth was filled with teeth of the sweet kind; hence my horror for the doses far exceeded the milder protests of the stomach. Not the slightest benefit came from my medicinal sufferings, and this ended all routine treatment of my stomach. My intense aversion to the flavor of strong medicines caused me to inflict them as rarely as possible upon other mouths during the drug period of my practice.
Mine seemed to be a weary stomach, in which the tired sense was a close approach to acute pain for hours after each meal. When a medical student I found nothing in the books, in the advice of my preceptor, nor in the lectures at the university, but what proposed to cure me through drugs that were abhorrent. As I never encountered any cures nor received the slightest benefit from my experiments, I was deterred from injuring myself through persistent dosage.
In the early part of my student career I was behind a drug-counter, where I had ample experience in putting up prescriptions, and had an excellent opportunity to measure medical men as revealed in their formulas and the results in many cases in which failure was the rule in chronic ailings; and I was not encouraged to abuse myself through the results as revealed by any form of medication.
For the benefit of those who suffer from complainings of the stomach I give a condensed summing-up of myself. I was born with a wiry constitution, but of the lean kind, and a weak stomach, the chiefest ancestral legacy. With ability to see with intense sense very much to enjoy in this world, my resources in this way were boundless, hence I was always full of hope and cheer.
All the senses of my palate were of the acute kind, and so were a continual source of the penalties of gluttony. Whatever else there might be alack with me, there was never a lack of appetite. I was able to eat at each meal food enough which, if fully digested, would have redeemed the wastes of any day of labor; and not only this, but also enough of sugar-enticing foods to anticipate the wastes of the following day.
Growing up in the country and with an intense fondness for the tart sweetness of apples, pears, and peaches, and the harmlessness of eating them no matter how full the stomach with hearty food, without question my stomach was never void of pomace during the entire fruit season.
Whenever I sat down to eat there was an onrush of all the senses of the palate as the outrush of imprisoned children to the ecstatic activities of the school-yard; hence over-eating always, with never a sense of satiety. The penalties were realized in painful digestion, with the duodenum the chiefest of protesting voices.
A time came when gas would so accumulate as to make the heart labor from mere pressure, the inevitable insufficiency of breath causing a lack of aëration of the blood. With a constant waste of power in the stomach there was always a sense of weariness; hence I was never able to know the luxury of power in reserve. All through life my best efforts were the result of intellectual inebriation, with always corresponding exhaustion as the direct result. This weakness compelled me to waste the least time on people who could not interest me, and to spend much time alone to recharge my exhausted batteries.
For such a case as mine there is not to-day to be found an intelligent hint in any medical text-book as to the physiological way to recovery.
The breakfasts in my house were of a character that, without ham, sausage, eggs, steaks, or chops, they would not have been considered worth spending time over. I had reached a time when a general collapse seemed to be impending; but it was stayed for a few years by the new life that came to me through the evolutions of health in the rooms of the sick that seemed to portend possible professional glories: but as the years went on I suffered more and more from nervous prostration through waste of power in the stomach.
My friends began to enlarge upon my wretched looks, and with no little concern; but none were wise enough to realize that my need was for words that reminded of life and not of death.
By chance I met an old friend on the street when he happened to be thinking about ways in daily food in Europe, from which he had just returned, and at once he began to talk, not about my wretched looks, but about the exceedingly light breakfasts customary in all the great centres where he had been. They consisted only of a roll and a cup of coffee. I was impressed just enough not to forget the fact, but without there being a hint in it to set me to thinking.
But the time came, "the fulness of time." There came a morning when for the first time I remembered that when in ordinary health I had no desire to breakfast; but there was a sense of such general exhaustion from power wasted over an unusual food mass not needed at the previous evening meal that my morning coffee was craved as the morning dram by the chronic toper. Only this, and a forenoon resulted of such comfort of body, such cheer, and such mental and physical energy as had never been realized since my young manhood was happy in the blessed unconsciousness of having a stomach that, no matter how large or how numerous the daily meals, never complained.
As for the dinner that followed, it was taken with an acuteness of relish and was handled with a power of digestion that were also a new, rich experience; but the afternoon fell far short of the forenoon. The experience was so remarkable that I at once gave up all eating in the morning, and with such reviving effects upon all my powers that the results began to be noticed by all friends.
So originated the no-breakfast plan. Up to this time I had never had a thought of advising anyone to do without food when desired; much less that any of the three daily meals should be given up. My war was against feeding when acute sickness had abolished all desire for food, and this I had been able to conduct many years without exciting suspicion of a general practice of homicide.
The improvement in my own case was so instant and so marked that I began to advise the same to others, and with the result that each would make known the redeeming work to suffering friends, and so the idea spread in a friend-to-friend way.
Now the American breakfast, in point of sheer necessity, is believed to be the most important meal of the day, as the means for strength that is to be called out for the forenoon of labor, and believed with a force of insistence that warrants a conclusion that a night of sleep is more exhausting to all the powers than the day of labor.
To go into the fresh air, to do anything with an empty stomach, is to invite a fainting by the way, is the general impression; but there were scarcely any cases in which there was not sufficient improvement to prevent all possibility of a return to the heavy breakfasts that had been abandoned.
How did this scheme affect me in a professional way, that is, in the reputation as a physician of average balance of brain functions? Some of my professional brethren of strong conviction and ready command of language began at once to try to abolish the dangerous heresy by suggesting that on this one subject I was absolutely crazy. Of course, their patrons took up this idea with avidity; and so there was a babble of tongues, with myself the central point of attack as crank-in-chief of all cranks. This is not the language of exaggeration; for whatever the law and modern civilization permitted to abolish me professionally was inflicted with tongues by the thousands, the war being made all the more exciting and interesting by the enthusiasm of new recruits to the heresy from the professional domains of my medical brethren.
What did I gain by this professionally? Mostly the odium of heresy during the first few years; but with it was the supreme satisfaction that came from seeing more additions to bright eyes and happy faces than medicine ever gave, and in a way that would redound to my own good at some time. The fact is, that as a means to better health, no matter what nor where the disease, there is no limit to its application. As a universal panacea its powers are matchless.
For a time I saw no farther than a cure of stomach condition and resulting general comfort. That any disease was to be cured otherwhere than in the stomach by means so simple, did not occur as an original conception; but the fact that giving up the morning meal was attended with improvement of all local diseases set me to thinking. Many of my patients became thin under the regime; but as this was attended by an increase of strength, not even the alarm of anxious friends without faith was ever able to induce a return fully to the old ways.
But how explain the loss of weight? A clue came from the following case: The first-born of a young mother had an habitual diarrhœa from birth lasting many months; and yet it seemed well nourished, for it was unusually fat and heavy for its age; but the days and nights were long in the care of this apparently well-nourished child. The symptoms were heedless to the every-hour dosing of pellets, or from the tumblers of apparently purest water.
Now this mother, young as she was, was a woman of convictions, and with courage to follow each to an ultimate conclusion. She had heard of miracles resulting from only three feedings per day during the nursing period; and so, notwithstanding a storm of opposition from a vast circle of relatives, she put this first-born rigidly on the three-meal plan, with the result of immediate cessation of the bowel trouble, but with rapid decline in weight.
This caused anxiety, and I was called upon for advice. In every respect except the weight-loss the improvement was wonderful. After much thought there was a sudden flash of the truth: there were an abnormal weight and bulk, due to the general dropsy of debility, similar in character to the swelling of the feet and limbs in the old and feeble. The thickened walls of the bloodvessels, toned with health, caused absorption; but the eyes of the friends would not open to the miracle for a very long time, and so render justice to the heroine, the young mother. As an aider and abettor of such a flagrant system of starvation, I had my full share of opprobrium; but, aided by the strong-minded, sensible mother, Nature gained a sweeping victory, and thus this case cleared my mind from confusion as to the anomaly.
One of my medical friends with whom calomel was as a sheet-anchor often asserted that babies would actually get fat on it. That bulk would actually increase by use of the forceful medicine is likely; but that the increase would be dropsical I think is unquestionable.
The dropsy of debility is due to a loss of tone of the vascular system; the walls of the vessels become thinner and therefore dilate. In the feet and limbs of the old and greatly enfeebled by disease the veins become distended to abnormal size by the force of gravity, resulting in effusion of water into the cellular tissues, which increases when in the upright position during the day and decreases when in the horizontal position at night.
A toning up of the entire vascular system, by which a reverse current from the tissues into the bloodvessels is made possible, is the only means for relief.
This flash-light upon the part physics plays in the cure of disease put me upon the true lines of investigation, and furnished a key for the solution of many problems. From this time on I was to be kept busy, not in winning victories, but in studying them.
This new physiology was not fully apprehended until long after the no-breakfast plan was taken up. It came to me link by link; but the missing link was the fact that food only restores waste, that lost strength is only restored by sleep; and it now seems to me that I was very dull not to have found it out long before I did. It seems to me that no method of health culture, none in the treatment of disease can have any physiological basis where these facts are not taken into account.
For a time I failed to look beyond the ailments of the stomach for curative results, until really surprising news began to reach me from many sources. There would come to me those who had to tell about clearer vision, acuter hearing, a stronger sense of smelling, etc., senses that were not thought to be affected by disease; or there would be news that chronic, local ailings, as nasal or bronchial catarrhs, skin diseases, hemorrhoids, or other intractable disease, in some mysterious manner, were undergoing a decline under the new regime.
In the domain of drugs we have medicines that vivid imagination has endowed with presumed affinities for locations that are diseased. They enter the circulation and happily get off at the right spot, to act curatively; but no theories are advanced as to how they aid in the construction of new cells or atoms, or how they aid in the disposal of the old ones.
Construction, destruction! There is no death of atoms: really nothing is generated, nothing destroyed: the change is but the rearranging of ultimate elements; and how is a drug to influence any more than would be in case of the affinities of chemistry?
Hazy conceptions, crude means! The ultimate cell multiplies by division to become bone, nails, hair, ligaments, muscles, fat, the brain, the whole body. Where along the line in the reconstructive work called by a disease or injury is a medicine to apply with power to aid? In what way the need to be expressed, in what operative way the helpful assistance made clear, that faith without works that are seen can be made strong?
The chemist never rushes into print with news that another element has been discovered until demonstrative evidence has placed the matter beyond all question. If anything new is discovered in the firmaments, adequate means to an end will be able to reveal it to all interested eyes.
The impressions of science are quite different from the impressions of the materia medica; and the miracles of cure that are displayed by the column in even the highest class public prints are never in reach of scientific explanation.
A new element is announced; we know instantly that it has been actually discovered. A new cure is announced; we instantly may know that the evidences will never be displayed along the lines of science.
I now unfold a theory of my own of the origin and development of disease, and the development of cure, in which the physical changes involved in some of the processes are in reach of the microscope.
It is my impression that, with rare exceptions, people are born with actual structural weaknesses, local or general, that may be called ancestral legacies. These are known as constitutional tendencies to disease.
In parts structurally weak at birth the bloodvessels, because of thin and weak walls, are larger than in normal parts, and because of dilatation the blood circulates slower. There is an undue pressure upon all between-vessel structures, a pressure that must lessen the nutrient supply more or less, according to its degree. The death of parts in boils and abscesses is due, I believe, to strangulation of the nerve-supply. The bloodvessels are elastic, and capable of contraction and dilatation, a matter regulated by the brain.
Now in these weaknesses always lie the possibilities of disease; they may be supposed the weak links in the constitutional chain, and can no more be made stronger than the constitutional design than can the body as a whole. By whatever means brain power is lessened abnormality is incited in the weak parts; hence gradually from the original weakness there is a summing up, as a bronchial or nasal catarrh, or other acute or chronic local or general disease.
The first step in any disease is the impression that lessens brain power; the slightest depressing emotion, the slightest sense of discomfort, lessens brain power, and to a like degree the tone of all the bloodvessels; hence dilatation in degree. That the stomach, as the most abused organ of the body, plays the largest part in over-drafts upon the brain is not a matter of doubt.
Let us develop a chronic disease along these lines, with nasal catarrh for an illustration. As tone is regulated entirely by the brain system, all taxing of the brain increases the debility of the nasal structures. In course of time the debility so increases through whatever also debilitates the brain, that a stage is reached when water in the blood begins to escape through the thin walls of the vessels and mingles with the natural secretion of the membrane, and a catarrhal discharge is the result. In severe cases a time may be reached when death of parts from the strangling pressure may occur, and then we have an ulcerative catarrh.
This evolution will go on as determined by the gravity of the ancestral weakness, by the natural strength of the dynamo, the brain, and the severity of the debilitating forces to which it may be subjected.
No one is ever attacked by a nasal or any other catarrh, nor by any other chronic ailings. They all start from structural weaknesses that are inherited, and they are the evolutionary results of brain-wearying forces.
If a specialist were asked to express the actual condition of a diseased structure that seems to call for medicinal aid, and to tell just how medicated sprays, washes, and douches are to reach all the parts involved, with healing power, and in what way that power is exercised – in other words, what work actually is to be done, and how medicine is to do it – he would not be able to enlighten his questioner no matter how fertile his conception, how dexterous his use of language. In fact, the healing power of drugs exists in fertile imaginations rather than among those ultimate processes where disease is cured, where disease destroys.
As the care moves by the power evolved in the dynamo, so do the bloodvessels contract and relax as determined by brain conditions. Dilating bloodvessels, effusion of water from thinning walls, the between-vessels starving pressure, increasing general debility of all the structures involved – this is the gradual evolution of catarrh and of all other chronic diseases.
From this it was seen that no form of local treatment can avail to relieve the operative cause in cases of this kind. Tone must be added to all the weakened, dilated vessels, in order to contract and thicken their walls so as to stop the leakage, and to relieve that pressure upon the between structures that have become anæmic through lack of nourishment.
That an evolution in reverse is the one need scarcely calls for argument. It is the brain that needs our attention, and we meet its need by saving its rare powers from wasting.
We will do this by cutting down, as far as possible, all the activities for which it furnishes power, even as we would diminish the number of cars where power in the dynamo had become deficient; we will either sever the wires that connect with the stomach, or make a marked reduction in the labor to be performed in the stomach. With power accumulating in the brain, power will reach the utmost recesses of debility and disease, with Nature to do all the healing.
To reinforce this physiology, this statement may be made with the strongest emphasis: the medical treatment of chronic disease fails inevitably because it fails to consider the vital force involved. The brain has no part in the treatment of chronic disease by the specialist, where drugs are a means to an end never reached: there are only a disappointment and an interchange of pocket-books.
In all parts suffering with pain there is congestion, swelling. The bloodvessels are distended; hence the nerves suffer violence in stretching or from pressure. The pain simply adds to the abnormal conditions by causing an active determination of the blood to the involved parts. To relieve pain, then, is curative, because it lessens the abnormal congestion.
The no-breakfast plan with me proved a matter of life unto life. With my morning coffee there were forenoons of the highest physical energy, the clearest condition of mind, and the acutest sense of everything enjoyable.
The afternoons were always in marked sluggishness by contrast, from the taxing of digestion.
Without realizing that the heavy meals of the day were a tax upon the brain, I would scarcely get away from the table before I began to feel more generally tired out than the severest taxing from a long forenoon of general activity ever made me. With the filled stomach, fatigue, general exhaustion, came as a sudden attack rather than as an evolution from labor, and there would be several hours of unfitness for doing any kind of service well.
In the application of this method to others I had the great satisfaction of good results without any exceptions; and the missionary work was begun by friends among friends, fairly spreading better health and adding thereby more and more disaster to my name.
More and more I became a focus of adverse criticism in all matters where level-headedness was deemed important. My acute cases began to be watched with hostile interest, as if homicide from starvation were the inevitable result in all cases. My country had become the country of an enemy.
Not being able to give my patients clearly defined reasons for the general and local improvements resulting from a forenoon fast as a method in hygiene, it had to be spread from relieved persons to suffering friends; and according to the need, the sufferers from various ailings would be willing to try anything new where efforts through the family physician or patent medicines had completely failed; it was spread as if by contagion, among the failures of the medical profession.
Among those to become interested at an early date was a prominent minister who wore the title of D. D., and for a time his interest was intense. He came to me one day with word that a member of his household, well known to me as a young woman of unusual ability and culture, had not been able to take solid food at his table for a year, and he believed that my treatment would avail in her case. To this she was very averse, since every treatment her hapless stomach had received had only added to the debility, until disability had become the result. She finally came to me to be relieved from the forceful importunity of her reverend friend, who had excited my eager interest with a prophecy that unusual literary distinction would follow a cure, as there were abilities of the very highest order, in his estimation.
She came, and I had no difficulty in securing such a vacation for the worn-out stomach that it could begin with solid food when the time to eat arrived. The vacation was so brief and power had accumulated so rapidly that almost any food could be taken without discomfort, and no trouble ever came not invited by a relapse from the better way of living that had really created a new stomach.
This case caused more notoriety over the no-breakfast plan than any that ever occurred in the city. As a writer of biographies and of articles in high-class journals and magazines, this talented woman has been a miracle of patient, persistent study and investigation.
This endorsement in high places greatly added to my reputation as a physician with distorted mind, for the idea that any good could come from a short fast, to be followed by the giving up of that needed morning meal, was too absurd for sober reflection, too violently revolutionary to be even patiently considered.
The no-breakfast plan was not so very long in becoming known over the entire city; a bridge had been crossed, and every plank taken up and destroyed; thence the ways into new families were nearly closed.
I am enlarging a little upon the opposition that met me from all points, because all who are to be convinced that these are the true ways in health culture will begin at once to enlighten their ailing friends, and will, therefore, encounter the same opposition. "Sir, you have not had enough opposition," said bluff, old Samuel Johnson. There will be no need to complain of any lack of this kind in the efforts to render suffering friends the only aid possible, that will be in persistent efforts of Nature.