Desbarreaux-Bernard says that Guillaume Granie died in the prison
of Toulouse in 1831, after a voluntary suicidal abstinence of
sixty-three days.
Haller cites a number of examples of long abstinence, but most
extraordinary was that of a girl of Confolens, described by
Citois of Poitiers, who published a history of the case in the
beginning of the seventeenth century. This girl is said to have
passed three entire years, from eleven to fourteen, without
taking any kind of aliment. In the "Harleian Miscellanies" is a
copy of a paper humbly offered to the Royal Society by John
Reynolds, containing a discourse upon prodigious abstinence,
occasioned by the twelve months' fasting of a woman named Martha
Taylor, a damsel of Derbyshire. Plot gives a great variety of
curious anecdotes of prolonged abstinence. Ames refers to "the
true and admirable history of the maiden of Confolens," mentioned
by Haller. In the Annual Register, vol. i., is an account of
three persons who were buried five weeks in the snow; and in the
same journal, in 1762, is the history of a girl who is said to
have subsisted nearly four years on water. In 1684 four miners
were buried in a coal-pit in Horstel, a half mile from Liege,
Belgium, and lived twenty-four days without food, eventually
making good recoveries.
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