Edward Hooker Dewey

Edward Hooker Dewey (1837–1904) was an American physician of Meadville, Pennsylvania, and the leading advocate of therapeutic fasting in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. A graduate of the University of Michigan medical school who served as an army surgeon in the Civil War, he came to believe from cases in his own practice that disease is cured by the body's own powers and that food given to a patient without appetite does harm. His books The True Science of Living (1894) and The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure (1900) spread the practice of omitting breakfast and of prolonged fasts.