'The fasting cure' answered / by Anthony Bassler.

  • Bassler, Anthony, 1874-
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: 'The fasting cure' answered / by Anthony Bassler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    recommend it for all diseases of which I have ever heard, with the exception of one—tuberculosis.” What unmitigated nonsense this is! It is so ridiculous that I cannot bring myself to answer it. “I know no two physicians who seem to agree in the diets they prescribe to consumptives, and I have never met two consumptives who follow the same regimen. The general idea seems to be to stuff as much food in your system as you possibly can, especially milk and raw eggs,”—when it is generally known among the best clinicians in medicine and sanatoria physicians that it is the fresh air, rest, and isolation that gets the patients relatively better, that the food is an unimportant factor so long as the patients take enough for their bodily needs, and that, in those with anorexia, milk and eggs, being fluid foods, which can thus be drunk when solids cannot be eaten, help to keep the food intake up to normal. “Several people wrote me who were in the last stages of some desperate disease. Of course, they had always been consulting with physicians, and the physicians had told them that my article was ‘pure nonsense,’ and they would like to try to fast, but that they were too weak and too far gone to stand it. There is no greater delusion than that a person needs strength to fast. The weaker you are from disease, the more certain it is that you need to fast,—if you fast under these circumstances, you will not grow weaker, but stronger. The fast is Nature’s remedy for all diseases—when you feel sick, fast.” What a cheap bicf for notoriety and commercial advantage, and what better manifesta- tion of the faker or faddist born in ignorance of the subject! We physicians going from one sick-bed to another soon learn one thing from clinical experi- ence, and that is, that whatever the disease or whoever the patient, when, by whatever means employed, nutrition by foods is or can be kept up, the chances of improvement are enhanced according to the quantity of food intake. But when, for whatever reason, this is not being done we immediately flgure the intensity of the disease and the usual duration of the illness against the balance of vital and reserve energy the person enters the illness with, helped out by the amount of the food intake during the period. We know well that in pneumonia, typhoid fever, etc., more people have been lost by insufficient intake of food during their illness than for any other reason, and instruct our nurses in their training schools accordingly. To what is the debility, emaciation, anemia, and devitality of convalescence from disease due if it is not to the ravages of the disease on the tissues, aided by the starvation consequent upon the small intake • of food or its imperfect utilization by the body during its acute course? In selecting nurses to care for such cases we strive to secure the services of those who are skillful in devising and preparing food in such ways as will circumvent the loss of appetite and the shortage in its utilization during the disease. We know it as a practical fact that by so doing the prognosis is rendered better, the dangers of complications fewer, and the convalescence shorter. The histories of over seventy-flve thousand cases of abdominal disorders which I have ob- served professionally, and which are on file at my command, show that subnutrition is a common factor in the large majority, a subnutrition which is the primary cause of their remaining ill and getting worse or of preventing their complete recovery. In most of those in which toxemia of intestinal