In the older writings there are instances reported in which the period of abstinence has varied from a short time to endurance beyond the bounds of credulity.
Hufeland mentions total abstinence from food for seventeen days, and there is a contemporary case of abstinence for forty days in a maniac who subsisted solely on water and tobacco.

Bolsot speaks of abstinence for fourteen months, and Consbruch mentions a girl who fasted eighteen months.

Muller mentions an old man of forty-five who lived six weeks on cold water.

There is an instance of a person living in a cave twenty-four days without food or drink, and another of a man who survived five weeks' burial under ruins.

Ramazzini speaks of fasting sixty-six days; Willian, sixty days (resulting in death); von Wocher, thirty-seven days (associated with tetanus); Lantana, sixty days; Hobbes, forty days; Marcardier, six months; Cruikshank, two months; the Ephemerides, thirteen months; Gerard, sixty-nine days (resulting in death); and in 1722 there was recorded an instance of abstinence lasting twenty-five months.
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.