The following article was found in the Wilkes-Barre (PA) Record, 14 Aug 1899, Page 6. If
anyone is interested in receiving a copy of this obituary, please send me your mailing
address.
(Instead of submitting this to any specific Mailing List, I am submitting it to the
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(This article will either make you sick...or hungry for a McDonald's Big Mac!)
"The Record several weeks ago gave the particulars of a long fast into which Rev. J.
Hughes Parry of Utica, NY, well know in Wilkes-Barre, had entered. The fast or the
disease for which it was undertaken has resulted in death, as noted in the following from
an exchange:
"Rev. J. Hughes Parry of the Moriah Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church, Utica, died
at Lake St. Catherine's, six miles from Poultney, VT., last week of exhaustion
following a fast of forty-seven days, undertaken in the hope of securing relief from a
chronic ailment.
"Mr. Parry's father died in Wales of the same disease. Mr. Parry came to Utica
from Holyhead, Wales, six years ago to take the Moriah Church pastorate, and the trouble
developed soon afterwards. He consulted various doctors, and some diagnosed the case as a
kind of dyspepsia, while others decided ith was catarrh of the bowels. None of them was
able to give him relief. Finally he head of a Meadville, Pa., doctor who had successfully
treated similar cases. He put himself under this man's treatment, which the doctor
dominated "the rest cure".
"The course provided that for twenty days the patient should eat no food. Mr. Parry
began his fast on May 15, and, as at the end of the twentieth day his trouble had not
disappeared, he decided to continue the treatment until he was cured. Accordingly for
forty-seven days he took absolutely nothing but cold water. During all that time he was
never confined to his bed entirely for a day, but the fast was attended with debility,
nausea and faintness. Mr. Parry continued to grow weaker and weaker, and when the fast
was ended, he looked more like a ghost than a man, and he was practically blind.
"During the first days of his fast he suffered much from hunger pangs, but after two
weeks the longing for food passed away. He lost thirty-six pounds. The first food he
took on July 2, when the fast ended, did not distress him greatly. It was a pre-digested
article.
"Mr. Parry's church people followed the course of the experiment with great
interest, although many of them were skeptical. When the fast ended they immediately made
arrangements to take him to Lake St. Catherine's to recuperate. He went there on July
4, and at first showed signs of improvement, but his strength was broken by the treatment.
Mr. Parry was 55 years old, and before coming to Utica in 1894 was pastor of several
prominent churches in Wales."
Nancy Cook
Pasadena, MD, USA