140 



ON THE DIGESTIVE FUNCTION, ET€. 



slight an excitement as surprise, and that she had then very lately lost the 

 use of her lower limbs. 



It afterwards appeared, that in this account of herself she was guilty of 

 some degree of imposition, in order to attract visiters, and obtain pecu- 

 niary grants. Dr. Henderson, another medical practitioner, of deserved 

 repute in the neighbourhood, had suspected this, and published his suspi- 

 cions :* and an intelligent committee was at length arranged, and assented 

 to by the woman herself, for the purpose of watching her by day and by 

 night. Cut off hereby altogether from fluids, which she had of late pre- 

 tended to rehnquish, as well as from solids, she was hardly able to reach 

 the tenth day, and still less to confess, as she then did, that she had occa- 

 sionally been supplied by her daughter with water and tea. " On the 

 whole," the committee conclude, in their account of her, though this 

 woman is a base impostor with respect to her pretence of total abstinence- 

 from all food whatever, liquid or sohd, yet she can perhaps endure the pri- 

 vation of solid food longer than any other person, it is thought by those 

 best acquainted with her, that she existed on a mere trifle, and that from 

 hence came the temptation to say that she did not take any thing. If, 

 therefore, any of her friends could have conveyed a bottle of water to her, 

 unseen by the watch, and she could occasionally have drunk out of itj 

 little doubt is entertained tliat she would have gone through the month's 

 trial with credit. The daughter says that her mother's principal food is 

 tea, and there is reason to believe this to be true."t But this opinien 

 leaves the case almost as extraordinary as before the detection of the fraud .; 

 for if true, and it is greatly borne out by the fact to which it appeals, this 

 woman was capable of subsisting on what is ordinarily regarded as no nu- 

 triment whatever, and required nothing more for her support than an oc- 

 casional draught of pure water. 



Hildanus, Haller, and other physiologists, have collected various in- 

 stances of a similar kind : many of them of a much longer duration of ab- 

 stinence ; some of them, indeed, extending to not less than sixteen years ; 

 but in general too loosely written and attested to be entitled to full reliance. 

 Yet the Philosophical Transactions in their difierent volumes contain nu- 

 merous cases of the same kind, apparently drawn up with the most scru- 

 pulous caution, and supported by the best kind of concurrent evidence. 

 In one of the earlier volumesj we meet with an account of four men who 

 were compelled to subsist upon v/ater alone for twenty-four days, in con- 

 sequence of their having been buried in a deep excavation by the fall of a 

 superincumbent stratum of earth under which they were working, and it 

 being this length of time before they were extricated. The water which 

 they drank of, was from a spring at hand ; and they drank of it freely, but 

 tasted nothing else. 



A still more extraordinary account is recorded in the same journal for 

 the year 1742, and consists of the history of a young man, v^^ho at the age 

 of sixteen or seventeen from having drunk very freely of cold v^ater when in a 

 violent perspiration, was thrown into an inflammatory fever, from which he 

 escaped with difficulty, and with such a dishke to foods of all kinds, that 

 for eighteen years^ at the time this account was drawn up, he had never 



* An eKfltninalioD of the impnsture of Anne Moorej called the fasting woman of Tutbury-y 

 &c. By Alexander Henderson, M D. 8vo. 1813. 



t A full exposure of Anne Moore, the pretended fasting %voman of Tutbury, 8vo. 1813, 



The newspapers have informed us that tiiis poor woman died at Macclesfield about the be- 

 ^innning of October 1825, at the advanced Bg:e of 76. 



t Phil. ^JVans. 1684. 



