Abstract
THE use of food of different kinds in disease, and the need of prohibition of food either in part or in toto, is a necessary part of the knowledge of every medical practitioner. The author of the above work seeks to magnify the importance of fasting over prolonged periods as the sole means of curing all the ills of human flesh. Some years ago another American writer wrote a book entitled the “No Breakfast Cure,” in which the omission of this very pleasant meal was lauded as the universal panacea for all illness. Mr. Carrington has, however, “gone one better,” and advises the discontinuance of all meals. His book is a strange medley, and hardly merits serious consideration in a scientific journal. Among its many assertions which are unsupported throughout by any experimental evidence are the following:—All medical science is wrong ab initio; diseases are nature's mode of cure; the taking of the impurities called foods is the source of all evil; the germ theory of disease is a myth; the law of conservation of energy is a fiction; food is not a source of energy or strength, but of weakness; the energy of the body is derived from an internal source, a kind of vital spirit in one's interior which can only be cleansed and rendered pure by the agency of starvation..
Vitality, Fasting, and Nutrition.
Hereward Carrington. With an introduction by Dr. A. Rabagliati. Pp. xl+648. (London: Rebman, Ltd., n.d.) Price 21s. net.
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H., W. Vitality, Fasting, and Nutrition . Nature 79, 66 (1908). https://doi.org/10.1038/079066a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/079066a0