QotD: on belief and fasting girls

[liveonearth]

It seems that no proposition that can be made is so absurd or impossible but that many people, ordinarily regarded as intelligent, will be found to accept it and to aid in its propagation. And hence, when it is asserted that a young lady has lived for fourteen years without food of any kind, hundreds and thousands of persons throughout the length and breadth of a civilized land at once yield their belief to the monstrous declaration.
--William A Hammond, Fasting Girls: Their Physiology and Pathology, 1879
(p102, The Fasting Girl, by Michelle Stacey)