The Red Cloud chief., 1880-03-04
CAV PEOPLE LIVE WITHOUT rood
some Reaaykahie Cases ef lSsg-Csssas.
ssd Hnsstsss Together With assss13 Cart
ous impossus~s sn the sAaae 1tnS-

90 s.ssi.s. Tss-ss.s .sss sssssss Csn-
oas impossuf~s I'm the same ltss-
DIR. William A. Hammond, in his in
teres,ing little volume on Fasting
Girls" did no, by any means exhaust
the subject to which attention was At
tracsed last year bv the case II Molly
Faneher. aud in which renewed interest
will now be taken because Of the pro-
posal already noticed in these columns
Of a physician in Minnesota 20 abstain
no; only from medicine, which would be
less surprising. but from food for a long
period under conditions favorable Ia the
detection II any imposture. of MEDIEVAL
cases Dr. Hammond cites several. There
was Liduine Of Schiedam. who fell i'll in
1895 and remained an invalid till her
death, 80 years later, and who, after liv-
ing for 10 years on a piece Of apple no
bigger than a holy wafer, every day,
washed down with n little water, n
swallow of beer or 3 little sweet milk.
wound up finally by taking nothing
whatever in the shape Of nutriment for
IA years. There was 81. Joseph Of Co
pertino, who kept seven 40-day fasts ey-
cry year, during which seasons he ate
only on Thursdays and Sundays, his
food even then being bitter herbs and
dried fruits. There was St. Nicolas Of
Fluc mot To be COMPOUNDED with St. Mich
olas Of the New York chimney who, As
he had embraced the monastic life, aban-
doned all food whatever save the Holy
Eucharist, which, according To the pious
CORES, SO assimilated his grosser being
=. ...ztl ~, .--l .....
sphere, he lived exclusively by grace
and by heaven. There was the II Of
Leicester, in the thirteenth century, who
also lived on the Eucharist for seven
years; and there were those other holy
persons-Saint Peter Of Alcantara, Saint
Rose of Lima, Saint Catharine of Sienna,
and Saint Collete-who also acquired
the power Of living on the sacramental
bread. Fasting girls, says DIR. Ham,
mond, came in with modern times, the
pious abstinents having vanished with
the Ages of Faith. Margaret Weiss, a
girl of ten, living neal Spires, was ac-
credited with living for three years
without food or drink. She succeeded
in deceiving the parish priest and DIR.
Geraldus B~uccoldinus, who watched her,
and the good doctor made a conun-
drum out of her in his book narrating
her case: "Why does the body grow
when nothing goes into it?" "Appo-
tonia Schreira, "A virgin in Berne," after
being examined and watched by the
Bernese magistrates, was declared to
live without eating: "in the first year
of her fasting she scarcely slept, and in
the second Year never once closed her
eyes i'm sleep" Katherine Binder of
the Palatinate was said to have taken
nothing but air during nine years,
and Eva Fliegen, of Meurs, according
to the magistrates and ministers, "tOok
no kind of ~sustenance for the space of
fourteen years together" Cardinal
Richelieu's physician, Franciscus Cite
sius, tells of Joan Balaam of Constance,
who after an attack of fever took a
loathing To food. and for nearly three
years abstained from it altogether, her
appetite subsequently returning. In
1895 there was brought To Cologne a
girl of IL. who, it was affirmed. had
lived without food or drink of any kind
for three years. In this case, accord
ing TO DIR. Hammond, organic disease
seems to have been complicated with
fraud and hysteria. Perhaps we need
not cite the works of John Heydon. an
enthusiast of the Rosie Cross, who held
that men could easily fast all their lives,
should the same even extend 800 wears,
and who fairly smacks his lips as it
We're, like a very glutton, over the fine
foreign fairness" in the air which ought
To be sufficient for all moderate folk.
He admits that people of enormous APP
petites might from time to time indulge
in the additional stimulus of a plaster of
cooked meat applied to the epigastrum.
Chambers, however, prints a great
many cases of alleged abstinence ex-
tending over protracted periods. Among
these may be mentioned that of Cecilia
Rygeway, whom Edward I'LL. ~pardoned
April %, 1857, "moved by piety and
for the glory of God and the Blessed
Virgin" who had wrought a miracle in
enabling her to live forty days in Not
tingham Jail without food or drink,
when accused of her husbands muir
der, and of John Scott, the Faster, a
man of T%eviotdale, who in 1881 took
sanctuary in the Abbey of Holyrood
House, where he remained thirty or
forty days without food, and then by or
der Of the King was shut up in the
castle for 80 days, ut the end of which
period the bread and water left in the
cell with him were found to be I'M
touched. Scott afterwards went to
Rome, where Clement VII. certified to
the honesty of his abstinence, an exhib-
ition of which he gave also at Venice;
after his return, as he claimed, from the
Holy Land, Scott went to London,
where, for preaching against Henry
Wills detection from the Church, and
his divorce from Katharine of Arragon,
he was cast into a prison, where he re-
manned for 80 days, little disconnected
and still fasting. Albergati of BOnoma
investigated SCOTS case ut his own
house, and September 1, 1892, after a
trial of II days, attested his belief that
the man lived without eating. The
case of Mary Waughton of Wigginton,
in S~taffOrdsnire, is also given, who
lived o a spoonful of milk and water a
day, with a piece of bread as large as a
half-crown, or a bit of meat the size of
a pigeons egg. "Being of the Church
of England" says the orthodox DR..
Robert Plot, "she is the less likely to
put a trick upon the. world" Then
there are the cases Of Christina Niche
lot of France. a girl of IL, who
from November, 1851, to May,
1755, lived upon water, afterwards
displaying her normal appetite;
of Ann Walsh of Harrowgate, a girl of
IL, who for Is months, beginning in
1862, subsisted solely on a daily allow
ance of a third of a pint of wine and
water; of the sick boy at Chateauroux,
in France, who II nothing for a whole
year. yet had strength enough to labor
with the men on his fathers farm; of
the man of Stamford, who, in I'LL, for
a fl0 wager abstained for So days from
solid food or milk; of Pennant's fasting
woman of Rosshire, Katherine Mcleod
in Platt's book she is called "Janet
who, after an attack of fever, lived for
81 months without nourishment. a suf-
locating construction compelling her
parents to desist when they tried to pry
open her teeth, depress her tongue and
1900 ~ - &c., L. &k.~-A