CASE 2 is that of a married woman, 39 years old, who had been a sufferer from disease for all of the adult period of life, and who had subsisted upon a diet of liquids for two years previous to death. Since girlhood, she had been treated without drugs (which she refused) by many different physicians for stomach derangement, but without success. Her condition grew worse month by month, until, in sheer despair, the fast was invoked, and, while death occurred at the end of fifty-seven days, the relief experienced leads to the expressed opinion that the treatment prolonged life for some weeks.
When the body was examined after death, the condition revealed was this: In the duodenum, just below the pyloric opening of the stomach, there must at one time have existed an ulcer or acute inflammation. Nature in her efforts at repair had deposited tissue cells at this point to the degree that the entire lumen of the intestine had finally been obstructed with the growth. There was no evidence of the characteristic cell formation of cancer, but merely that of an accumulation of tissue that occluded the gut. The right kidney was in a state of complete
