Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 April 1887 — How to Live Without Eating. [ARTICLE]

How to Live Without Eating.

Henry Howard explains in his article on “Fasters and Fasting” in the Cosmopolitan how it is that some people and and animals can get along without food: Auto-suggestion, or a belief that one is nourished when one is not, is a great thing, and accounts for many phenomena otherwise inexplicable. Sedillot relates an incident to prove its existence in the animal kingdom as well: “A tortoise weighing one kilogramme and a half had been captured and permitted during several weeks to wander around the garden, subsisting on flies and other insects. When weighing two kilogrammes the creature, was recaptured and eviscerated from behind, its head, members, and shell being left intact. It was then restored to its liberty weighing fifteen grammes less than at the time of its first capture, and, although entirely hollow and open in its posterior aspect, it roamed about as before, snapping up flies that, after being swallowed, readily escaped from behind. After two weeks the animal was taken and again weighed, when it was found to be five grammes heavier than at the period immediately after its evisceration. The creature was a oroyant —that is, it believed it was taking into its system an abundance of aliment; it was growing fat. What was this mysterious energy that worked an apparent impossibility if not auto-suggestion ?” On the other hand, this sensation of hunger is, at least, in a certain measure, independent of the state of inanition. In other words, in cases of nervous diseases hunger may be felt acutely, with all its distressing effects, in a body sufficiently nourished. In support of this distinction, M. de Parville says: “We are acquainted with a lean lawyer and a fat engineer, both of them neurasthenic. If the lawyer does not take a glass of Madeira and a sand wich at 5 o’clock he becomes livid and lias an attack of vertigo. The engineer is tougher. For about a year he guarded himself against his indiosyncracy by smoking, but toward half past 7, when he came homo and smelled the odor of the dishes, if he was not served on the instant he could not control himself, and went into a veritable fury. He became positively and in spite A)f himself furiously ravenous. And yet he was fat, add had no need to repair the losses of the organism that was already too well nourished. ” So also numerous stories are found in all ancient medical dictionaries relative to those great eaters whose insatiable stomachs engulphed enormous njasscs of solids and liquids. Such*was the case of Tararus, who went so far as to drink the blood of his patients and eat the flesh of his cadavers, and who was suspected of having devoured a 4-year-old child; yet he had a most sweet disposition when he wasn’t hungry;" -- !!!!!!!"