Prolonged abstinence from foods providing certain essentials to normal life processes results in various well known deficiency diseases which must be distinguished from changes arising in normal animals suddenly deprived of all food intake. For purposes of clarity the former may be regarded as changes arising from chronic starvation and the latter as those arising from acute starvation. It is with healing in diseases arising from acute starvation that this paper is concerned.
A review of the literature reveals that investigators unanimously agree that acute starvation does not inhibit either growth or repair. McCollum and his co-workers1 demonstrated that fasting would cause active rickets in rats to heal from within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Shipley and Holt2 reported studies in vitro and stated that solutions to which 51.3 millimols of sodium chloride had been added inhibited calcification in preparations of the bones of rats with rickets, while similar