The Fasting Cure by UPTON SINCLAIR MITCHELL KENNERLEY NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXI COPYRIGHT, 1911 BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. TO BERNARR MACFADDEN in cordial appreciation of his personality and teachings...

In the Cosmopolitan Magazine for May, 1910, and in the Contemporary Review (London) for April, 1910, I published an article dealing with my experiences in fasting. I have written a great many magazine articles, but never one which attracted so much attention as this. The first day the magazine was on the news-stands, I received a telegram from a man in Washington who had begun to fast and wanted some advice; and thereafter I received ten or twenty letters a day from people who had questions to a

( unfit to print ) Arden, Del. , May 31, 1910. Editor of the Times , New York City, Dear Sir ,—Some time ago your news columns contained a despatch to the effect that three young ladies in Garden City, Long Island, were undertaking a three days' fast as a result of reading a magazine article recommending this measure. In your editorial referring to this despatch, you say that the ladies are "the victims of a shallow and unscrupulous sensationalist." As I am the writer of the magazine article in

A most discouraging circumstance to me was the attitude of physicians, as revealed in the correspondence that came to me. Mostly I learned of this attitude from the letters of patients who quoted their physicians to me. From the physicians themselves I heard practically nothing. We have some one hundred and forty thousand regularly graduated "medical men" in this country, and they are all of them presumably anxious to cure disease. It would seem that an experience such as mine, narrated over my

At the time of writing these words, it has been just six months since I published my first paper upon fasting, and I am still getting letters about it at the rate of half a dozen a day. The tent which I inhabit is rapidly becoming uninhabitable because of pasteboard boxes full of "fasting-letters"; and the store-keeper who is so good as to receive my telegrams over the 'phone, is growing quite expert at taking down the symptoms of adventurers who get started and want to know how to stop. I could

There was much newspaper discussion of my fasting papers—most of it being sarcastic. The most biting comment that I recall came from somewhere out West, and ran about as follows: "A Seattle man fasted forty days for stomach trouble. His stomach is troubling him no longer. He is dead." I set to work to find out about this case, and I give the facts on page 137. I also saw a report from the London Daily Telegraph to the effect that a man had died in South Africa as a result of trying my "cure." Ho

The reader will observe that I discuss this fasting question from a materialistic view-point. I am telling what it does to the body; but besides this, of course, fasting is a religious exercise. I heard the other day from a man who was taking a forty-day fast, as a means of increasing his "spiritual power." I am not saying that for you to smile at—he has excellent authority for the procedure. The point with me is that I find life so full of interest just now that I don't have much time to think

Many people write me, begging me to outline for them the ideal diet. I used to do that sort of thing, but I have stopped; having come to realize that we are still at the beginning of our diet-experiments. I have done a good deal of experimenting myself, and have made some interesting discoveries. I have lived for a week on fruit only, and again on wheat only; I have lived for three weeks on nothing but milk, and again on nothing but beef-steak. I have lived for a year on raw food, and for over t

I am asked many questions as to my attitude toward the question of meat-eating. I was brought up on a diet of meat, bread and butter, potatoes, and sweet things. Four years ago when I found myself desperately run down, suffering from nervousness, insomnia, and almost incessant headaches, I came upon various articles written by vegetarians, and I began to suspect that my trouble might be due to meat. I went away on a camping-trip for several weeks, taking no meat with me, and because I found that

London, Ontario , May 2, 1910. Dear Sir ,—Your article in a recent magazine very greatly interested me. My sister, on her way home from a five-and-a-half-weeks' visit in Boston and New York, where she had been endeavoring to discover the causes of her frightful headaches, bought that number of the magazine and read your experience, with, as you can well imagine, a deep interest. In Boston she had consulted one of the two physicians supposed to head the profession (as consultants) in that city. T

From early childhood until January 9, 1910, or about twenty years in all, I had been a sufferer from asthma, and chronic catarrh in addition. As a child I was sick a great deal of the time, having regular attacks every few weeks, of such little troubles as bilious fevers, chills and la grippe, with pneumonia, typhoid, measles, whooping cough and the like sprinkled in at times. I have taken gallons of castor oil, and pounds of calomel and quinine, I think. I don't believe I ever had more than one

Mr. L. F. Rader of Olalla, Wash., died at 12.15 P. M. , May 11, 1910, at 123½ Broadway North, in the forty-seventh year of his age. Mr. Rader's physical history is one of intermittent suffering. As the result of an accident in childhood in which he was internally injured, his youth and early manhood were filled with a succession of most acute attacks of painful illness. About fifteen years ago he deserted the orthodox means of treatment and turned to what is now known as the natural or drugless

Dec. 11, 1910. Mr. Horace Fletcher ,    Care Editor of Good Health ,         Battle Creek, Mich. My dear Mr. Fletcher ,—It must have been a year and a half ago that we had our talk on the subject of fasting; you promised me that you would investigate it. I have only just seen the copy of the November Good Health , and discovered that you carried out your promise. There are some things in connection with your account about which I want to ask you. You say that you have come to agree with Dr. Kell