Here’s something fun, a book written in 1900 called “The No Breakfast Plan and The Fasting Cure”. It’s a delightful time capsule written by an MD, a man of science, from a time before antibiotics, before insulin, before chemotherapy, when they still had diseases called “melancholia” and “dyspepsia”. His data are a collection of case notes of patient stories and self experimentation. The language is animated by personality and humour:
“So originated the no-breakfast plan. Up to this time I had never had a thought of advising anyone to do without food when desired; much less that any of the three daily meals should be given up. My war was against feeding when acute sickness had abolished all desire for food, and this I had been able to conduct many years without exciting suspicion of a general practice of homicide.
The improvement in my own case was so instant and so marked that I began to advise the same to others, and with the result that each would make known the redeeming work to suffering friends, and so the idea spread in a friend-to-friend way”
