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.
11/15 (page 10)
![origin is present this is not so much secondarj' to e.xcessive food intake as it is to the intake of improper food for the condition, functional, bacterial, organic, or malignant, as the case may be. In the first three of these, fortunate is the stomach specialist or interaist who, recognizing the cause, corrects it by measures which include superalimentation in the treatment, and lucky is tlie patient who has such a physician to guide him. Fasting is right enough for tliose who are not actually ill, but, as a general rule, for the patients I see it is suicidal, for in them dieting according to their condition with sulficient food intake is called for, and not fasting. Tirade on physicians.— Of course, one presenting such a subject as this must appear knowing and strong as a teacher-prophet. If it is good business to denounce those in the field which the author of this book seeks to cover, why not be thorough about it and ridicule the entire profession as a body? To claim that there is no good in any of their endeavors might result in their being hamstrung the more quickly and surely in the public’s estimation. Thus the statements are to be as radical as possible, for the book must be sold at all hazards. Therefore these words: “We have some one hundred and forty thousand regularly graduated medical men in this country, and they are all of them presumably an.xious to cure disease,” yet, “out of six or eight hundred letters that I have : received, just two, as far as I can remember, were from physicians; and out of i the hundreds of newspaper clippings which I liave received, not a single one ! was from any sort of medical journal. There was one physician, in an out-of- ^ the-way town in Arkansas, who was really interested—one single mind, among all the hundred and forty thousand, open to a new truth.” Even this one poor, deluded brother, if he is the proper sort of a practitioner, must have changed his mind when he had tried the “cure” in his practice. If he has not, I beg to offer the following before he does, so that he may not plead that he had not been warned in time. “Sometimes it seems to me that we have no right to j expect their help at all, and that we never will receive it. For we are asking j them to destroy themselves, economically speaking—and it must be difficult for a hard-worked and not very highly paid physician to contemplate the ] triumph of an idea which would leave no place for him in civilization.” J Now the reason for the existence of the million or more regular practising S physicians throughout this world is that the people need them,—^need them * every moment in the day and night. This has been true for centuries; it is f more so today than ever before, and -nfill be still more true in all times to come. As it is human for one to know the value of a service rendered, so each one of them realizes daily the help he gives to the people. If the reader will think for a moment of the value of the services physicians and surgeons have rendered to the small group of people about him or her, then multiply this by all of the other people in the world, and this by the number of those in times.gone by, the value of physicians’ work and_the correct response to the above ungrateful words will be evident. There is much more in his book along the same lines, words expressing selfish desires and ignorance so flagrant that they need not be pointed out to any one.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22433235_0012.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
