The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure

In 1900, a Civil War veteran and physician made a radical claim: that most human illness stems from one source, and the cure is simpler than anyone imagined. Edward Hooker Dewey observed during his years in military hospitals that patients denied food during fever often survived while those force-fed did not. This observation became the foundation of a controversial medical philosophy that would captivate the public and go through three editions by 1921. Dewey argued that the body, when freed from the burden of constant digestion, possesses remarkable self-healing powers that modern medicine had been actively suppressing. He advocated for abandoning breakfast entirely, consuming only two meals daily, and undertaking extended fasts to cure everything from tuberculosis to insanity. Part medical memoir, part philosophical manifesto, this book captures a moment when a lone doctor dared to question the foundations of contemporary medicine and proposed that the path to health might lie not in what we add to our bodies, but in what we withhold.