The Fasting Cure
In 1911, the author of The Jungle turned his relentless investigative eye on his own body. Upton Sinclair had spent years battling illness conventional medicine couldn't touch, until he stumbled upon fasting and experienced what he believed was a revelation: the body's innate power to heal itself when given the chance. This book is his passionate, often alarming account of extended water fasts and their supposed cure-all effects on everything from tuberculosis to cancer to the common cold. Written with the same muckraking fervor that exposed the meatpacking industry, Sinclair presents fasting not as a diet trend but as a wholesale rejection of industrial medicine and the overfed, under-exercised modern lifestyle. He cites his own dramatic transformations, interviews with practitioners, and a philosophy that frames the body as a machine requiring periodic resets. The medical establishment of his day condemned it as dangerous faddism, and modern readers will find plenty to critique. Yet the book endures as a fascinating artifact of early twentieth-century wellness culture, and as a window into one of America's most restless reformers searching for bodily liberation in an age of increasing industrial control. For readers curious about the roots of modern wellness obsessions, or anyone interested in Sinclair beyond his fiction, this remains a provocatively strange document.
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“In the evening I came home and read about the Messina earthquake, and how the relief ships arrived, and the wretched survivors crowded down to the water's edge and tore each other like wild beasts in their rage of hunger. The paper set forth, in horrified language, that some of them had been seventy-two hours without food. I, as I read, had also been seventy-two hours without food; and the difference was simply that they thought they were starving.””
— Upton Sinclair
“early drug treatment is responsible for later and fatal disease.””
— Upton Sinclair
