Chapter D: Godman

* * * * *

BRIGHTON.

I have read with the greatest interest the correspondence in _The
Healthy Life_ on the unfired diet. As the majority of your
correspondents have not been living _exclusively_ on unfired food,
or have only done so for short periods, may I suggest that some of
your correspondents or contributors live on an _entirely_ unfired
diet, _excluding dairy produce_, for a period of six or twelve
months and then relate their experiences. In this way some valuable
evidence would be obtained. At any rate I am prepared to do this
myself.

With reference to living on the unfired diet on 4d. a day, I have
often had two unfired meals for less than 4d., and two meals a day
are sufficient for anyone. Of course to do this one has to buy the
food which is in season and therefore cheap. Dried fruit and nuts,
followed by a cress salad with oil and lemon dressing, does not
cost more than 2d. An unfired rissole made from grated carrot and
flaked peanuts cost at most a penny, and if followed by dates or
figs would be a sufficient meal, and 2d. would cover the cost.

In conclusion, I have no difficulty in producing a "two course"
unfired meal for 2d.--but perhaps I should have left the subject of
cost for Dr Bell to deal with. Yours faithfully,

ALFRED LE HURAY.

MORE ABOUT TWO MEALS A DAY.

With reference to my article, "Two Meals a Day," which appeared in the May issue of _The Healthy Life_, several correspondents have asked me to give more particulars about my life and diet. I do so gladly; but I must be brief, as the demand upon space in this magazine is now very great.

Resolved into a single sentence, what all my correspondents wish to know is this: Is a two-meal dietary best for all?

To this question, however, a definite answer cannot be given, for the simple reason that scientific experimentation with respect to food quantities and times of meals, etc., has gone such a little way, so that it would be presumptuous to set a limit in regard to meals and food reduction. To my mind, apart from the question of the quantity of food to be taken, there is a great and important field of inquiry open with respect to the effect of rest upon the stomach and the intestines, upon the digestive and assimilative powers of the body.

Now the whole purpose of my article was to show that a reduction of one's dietary was a matter of training, of gradual adaptation, but also--and this is the important fact-of gradual strengthening. My theory is that the two-meal plan is possible owing to the immense economy in digestive energy that is effected through giving the stomach adequate rest, and also through keeping the blood stream pure and unclogged, almost absolutely free from surfeit matter. A rested stomach will get more nutriment out of a small amount of food-stuff than an overworked stomach will get out of a much larger quantity. But experimentation which is sudden and covers a few weeks only, is worse than useless, as it tends to disprove the very principles that a saner method of experimentation would probably establish. And if I can impress this fact upon the reader I shall have performed a good service.

Carefully undertaken, and properly graduated, I believe there are few people in these days who would not greatly benefit by a reduction in the number of meals and in the quantity of food they take. By means of a healthy and cheerful habit of introspection--not morbid and feverish--I am firmly convinced that by cutting down their meals most people would not only greatly improve their health, but their mental and spiritual condition as well, and also greatly increase their capacity for work ... And if in this way we can effect such an improvement in our life and condition it does not really matter whether we get to the two or even one meal basis or not.

As to myself, my work is chiefly literary and my life moderately sedentary. But the fact is that I now have two moderate meals a day whereas I used to have four pretty good ones. But I have many friends whose work is mechanical, and demands much muscular energy, who are two-mealists. One lady I know, who is one of the healthiest, strongest and best physically developed persons I have ever met, is a two-mealist, and not only does she work at a mechanical occupation for ten hours a day, but on several evenings each week conducts a ladies gymnastics class as well. But in her case, as in mine, the two meal was an ideal that was gradually and slowly attained, and not a sudden reform. Indeed, the main thing to remember is that it is all a matter of training, it being quite impossible to say where the limit is. For of one thing I am quite sure--viz. that most people, were they to adopt a slow process of food and meals reduction, on the lines I suggested in my article, would be astonished at the result. The number of people one meets, chiefly among those whose life is more or less sedentary, who say they can't work as they should, are subject to pains and heaviness in the head, constipation and indigestion, is simply appalling; and on questioning such people I come to the conclusion that in the majority of cases it is because they eat too much or too often.

My meals are very simple, and the simpler they are the better I like them. I like a cold lunch about noon, and a hot meal about six. I have tried a wholly uncooked diet, but as yet my body does not seem ready for it: perhaps it will be after a little while. The first meal usually consists of wholemeal bread and fruit, green or vegetable salads, just according to my needs at the time. In winter I take a more liberal supply of dried fruits and nuts. Pulses I eschew altogether. My second meal consists of a substantial entree with one or two conservatively cooked vegetables--occasionally I have a soup and a sweet in addition. But of course it is for everyone to find out his or her own ideal diet; and let me say that it is worth while to do so, even though it involves much confusion and perplexity during the period of experimentation.

WILFRED WELLOCK.

A BALLADE OF SKYFARING.

Ye whom bonds of the city chain,
Yet whose heart must with Nature's be;
Ye who, bound to a bed of pain,
Dream there of torrent and tower and tree,
Here behold them--the magic key,
Turned by a thought in yon gates of blue,
Even now has revealed to me
Alps and Mediterranean too.

Why of the bondage of earth complain?
Wide as heaven is our liberty!
Where are the streets and their smoke and stain
When to the land of the lark we flee?
Where is the sight that we may not see,
Cloudland's citadel passing through?
Switzerland beckons with Sicily,
Alps and Mediterranean too.

Here, 'twixt walls with the marble's vein,
Oared on a river of gold are we;
There we watch, on a sapphire main,
White fleets voyage to victory.
Day unto day flashes grief or glee;
Night to night utters speech anew,
Figuring forest and lane and lea--
Alps and Mediterranean too.

ENVOY

Prince whose course through the world is free,
Fare you better than dreamers do?
Here are the mountains and here the sea--
Alps and Mediterranean too.

S. GERTRUDE FORD.

From _Lyric Leaves_, by S. Gertrude Ford. Cloth, 2s. 6d. net; 2s. 8d. post free from _The Healthy Life_, 3 Amen Corner, E.C. This charmingly bound book makes an excellent holiday companion, for it contains many beautiful lyrics, all characterised by serious thought, generous human sympathies and a delicate imaginative quality.

A REMEDY FOR LONGEVITY.

Once upon a time there was a little boy whose parents took things very seriously. They answered all his questions with painstaking precision. At a comparatively early age he could prove that fairies were non-existent. At the same time his toys were marvels of mechanical perfection.

At the age of seven he was sent to a very efficient school, where, being naturally a bright boy, he gained high marks every term and passed all the examinations, for he had a wonderful and well-trained faculty for remembering exactly what his teachers had told him.

When he left school he entered a London merchant's office, where his knowledge of arithmetic was of the greatest assistance in bringing him to the front. Moreover, he could argue very tellingly with all the clerks and warehousemen, and always knew what the morning papers were saving about health, neck-ties or religion.

In course of time he grew a moustache, joined the Territorials, was made a partner in the firm, married a well-educated young lady and became a strong supporter of the local Liberal Club, where his opinions were so well known that it was unnecessary for anyone seriously to combat them. He was never known to vote for the Conservative candidate or to lose his head. His concluding speech in the historic debate on The National Health Insurance Act will always be remembered, by those who heard it, for its earnest defence of the medical profession. In fact, the Mayor, who was in the chair, and was a doctor himself, warmly congratulated the speaker, who was evidently very pleased.

Ten years later he became a Town Councillor, opened several Institutes for the Care of the Poor, and sent his second son to join the eldest at the same kind of school at which he (the father) had been so well trained. About the same date he bought a new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and carefully compiled a list of facts and figures showing that idealists and all new-fangled ideas were the greatest danger to the increasing trade and expansion of the Empire.

At the age of fifty he took a house at Surbiton and was continually congratulated on his hale and hearty appearance. His opinions were known and respected by all who met him. His sons were models of what the children of such a father should be, and they supported him in every argument.

At the age of fifty-two he retired from business. A month later he had an idea; and it so interfered with all his opinions, and so affected his general health, that he died.

EDGAR J. SAXON.

A SIGNIFICANT CASE--II.

He stopped smoking tobacco on the second day, and does not mean to resume its use. Of course he had no alcohol in any form during the fast, but he never has taken much alcohol, although he was not a pledged abstainer. The temperature was taken many times and seems to have been almost always subnormal, about 97 degrees Fahr., but this is not so unusual a condition as to call for comment. The chief cause of a subnormal temperature, in my opinion, is blocking of the body with too much food. No doubt in prolonged fasting the temperature may fall also; but sometimes a fast will be the cause of raising a subnormal bodily temperature, as happened in a case of mine in which on the twenty-eighth day of the fast there was a large elimination of urates by the kidneys and a rise of temperature from 96 degrees to 98.4 degrees. Subnormal bodily temperature has not received the attention which it deserves. It is usually one of the forerunners, or prodromata as they are called, of the onset of incurable diseases like cancer, Bright's disease or apoplexy. The commonly accepted view that the heat of the body depends upon the food, and that people eat blubber in the Arctic and Antarctic regions to keep the bodily heat up, is one of the chief causes for neglect of the study of subnormal temperature. And it is quite surprising that physiologists have not thought it necessary to explain why nature has provided sugar and palm oil and cocoa-nut oil and ground-nut oil in the tropical regions, as well as abundance of olive oil in the warm temperate regions of the earth if these foods keep the bodily heat up. They ought to have been more abundantly supplied in the Arctic and Antarctic regions if the accepted view is correct. Besides, if we must eat blubber to keep bodily heat up in the Arctic regions when the outside temperature is 50 or 100 or more degrees lower than that of the body, what ought we to eat in the tropics to keep bodily heat down when the outside temperature is 50 or even 80 degrees above that of the body? Physiologists have not explained this, although assuredly an explanation is wanted. But the true explanation, the correct explanation, would have demolished the doctrine that bodily heat is due to the food, and so it has not been given. It is too simple to imagine that the bodily heat is, like the body itself and all its functions, the effect of the life-force that inhabits the body and builds up the body so that the body shall be a fit dwelling-place for itself--this explanation is too simple and too idealistic for modern science, which is less and less disposed, we are told, to invoke the aid of a force of life to account for vital phenomena, although it assumes an attracting force to account for gravitating phenomena, and an electric and chemic force to account for electric and chemic phenomena. Modern science (and ancient science, too, apparently) which sees well enough that an idealistic or a materialistic explanation would equally account for the nexus of the phenomena of the universe, deliberately and almost invariably prefers the materialistic explanation. She is anxious that we should be kept free of superstition. But the superstition that forces are the effects of things does not seem to distress her at all. And so we are told that gravitation is a property of matter, and are forbidden to think that perhaps gravitation, a force, procreates matter, a thing, in order that the effects of the fore may be perceived by dull sense. We are told that the function of the liver and the brain depends on the structure of the liver and the brain respectively and we are not allowed to think that perhaps the force of animal life, feeling the need of an instrument to secrete bile, on the one hand, and to secrete cerebral lymph to act as a vehicle for the conveyance of thought and emotion and higher things, on the other, introduces the liver with its elaborate structure and the brain with its still more complicated structure, in order that both the one function and the other may be well performed. And so, although all forms of kinetic energy (and among them zoo-dynamic, or the force of animal life) manifest warmth and luminosity as qualities, science attributes animal heat to chemic force and refuses to consider that perhaps zoo-dynamic uses chemico-dynamic for its own purposes, even if these purposes are unconscious, because the higher force always dominates the lower. Properly speaking, science is out of her sphere, though she does not seem to know it, in making these suggestions. When she keeps herself to the investigation of facts, their exposition, their sequence and their laws, in her painstaking and accurate manner, we accept her revelations thankfully, and beg her to allow us to make our own philosophic and other explanations in attempting to account for the existence, sequences and relations of the facts of life.

After his return home, patient continued to gain weight, as might have been expected. On the seventeenth day after ending the fast he weighed 140 lbs. and on the nineteenth day 144 lbs. On that day he received from a hospital a report that the reaction of the physiologico-pathological test was negative. This has naturally had a great effect on the patient; and it is worthy of very careful consideration. Of course one negative result may not be conclusive although it was positive before the fast. But if the result should be repeated, and especially if it should prove to be permanent, the importance of the fact can hardly be exaggerated, since the suggestion arises in our minds that perhaps we may be able to cure profound blood-poisoning by fasting, neither the usual treatment nor the use of Salvarsan enabling the investigator to say that the result of the pathological reaction was negative; but this has followed after a heroic fast of 56 days. The result if confirmed would not be unique. Quite recently I saw a specific ulcer close to the ankle-joint for which operation had been recommended. It seemed to me that operation would be likely to open the joint, and that therefore it was a risky proceeding. But under a restriction of the diet, putting the young man on barley-water for a few days and then advising him to eat once a day only, the ulcer became very much smaller, and no operation has had to be performed. Blood-poisoning of this nature, of course, is not caused by improper nutrition, but it may readily be believed to be aggravated by the ordinary conventional over-feeding to which, so far as I can see, we are all subjecting ourselves, especially as persons who put themselves in the way of contracting blood-poisoning do not generally belong to the class of those who are attracted by the suggestion that it is noble to keep the body under, and that if we do not strive to keep the body under, it will be very likely to keep us under. Although we shall be liable to be infected, however we live, still we may believe that we shall be more likely to be badly infected (if we put ourselves in the way of contracting disease) if we have been previously subjected to the bad effects of over-feeding. This consideration renders a possible cure by fasting, a not impossible suggestion. And if, therefore, we have in fasting the suggestion of a remedy which offers us the hope of eradicating such a fearful disease from the human system, it certainly behoves us to make use of it.

As a rule it seems to me that bad forms of blood-poisoning of this nature are incurable. In three or four generations they destroy the strain affected by it, do what we will. Meantime it shows all the signs and symptoms of a hereditary disease, for the children are born suffering, showing a coppery rash, and old before they are young. And when they get a little older they have no bridges to their noses, their teeth are ill-formed, their vision is imperfect, their intellects dull. It seems as if nature could not forgive crimes of this nature. She seems to treat them as the unpardonable sin. If we find cancer appearing in a family at 55 years of age in 3 or 4 successive generations, there is no proof of heredity in that. Inquire and see if like causes acting on like organisms in 3 or 4 successive generations have not produced the disease each time. The children are not born cancerous, and our efforts to prevent the disease may succeed. But children often _are_ born with specific disease, and there is no doubt at all about its being a hereditary disease. Even now I should not like to sanction marriage in the case of this man who has heroically fasted for 56 days, although he seems for the present to have got rid of his disease. But the outlook is hopeful, more hopeful than I thought, and in the hope that the suggestion may convey a message of hope to those who are willing to do penance for crimes against the body, I send out these remarks. The opinion expressed by the patient that he was getting rid of the Salvarsan which had been injected into his blood to cure his disease is, of course, his own only. I offer no opinion upon it. But I think the whole case very instructive, and it will be deeply interesting to follow it up with special regard to the inquiry whether the pathological test remains negative. The reflective reader of these remarks will need no hint from me to suggest how a study of questions of this sort raises in our minds all sorts of other questions, physical, metaphysical, philosophical, social, religious; what are laws of nature, how they come to be what they are, whether they can be disregarded without paying the penalty, and whether we men are bond or free. Each of us will settle these questions for ourselves, for each of us is responsible for his own conclusion. But as to the inevitableness with which such questions do rise in our minds, I take it there can be no difference of opinion.

A. RABAGLIATI.

HEALTHY HOMEMAKING.

_For the benefit of new readers it seems well to explain that this series of articles is not intended for the instruction of experienced housewives. It was started at the special request of a reader who asked for "a little book on housekeeping, for those of us who know nothing at all about it; and put in all the little details that are presumably regarded as too trivial or too obvious to be mentioned in the ordinary books on domestic economy."_