Why Doctors in 1911 Rejected Fasting (And What Changed)
In 1911, the medical establishment called fasting quackery. Here's why they rejected it — and how science eventually proved them wrong.
When Upton Sinclair published The Fasting Cure in 1911, he expected curiosity. What he got instead was hostility. The medical establishment attacked him as a "shallow and unscrupulous sensationalist" — a phrase that appeared in the New York Times. His mail from readers who tried fasting and reported remarkable results ran to 600–800 letters. Of those, barely two came from physicians. This collision between patient experience and medical orthodoxy is one of the more instructive episodes in the history of…
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