Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New Hygiene

Part 1

GOOD HEALTH AND HOW WE WON IT

“THE BATTLE OF THE BLOOD”

Micro-photograph of leucocytes (white and grayish bodies) in conflict with Germs (black dots and bodies). In Fig. A the germ is that of influenza, in Fig. B that of plague.]

GOOD HEALTH AND HOW WE WON IT

WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE NEW HYGIENE

BY UPTON SINCLAIR AND MICHAEL WILLIAMS

WITH SIXTEEN FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

INTRODUCTION 1

I. THE BATTLE OF THE BLOOD 21

II. HOW TO EAT: THE GOSPEL OF DIETETICS ACCORDING TO HORACE FLETCHER 41

III. THE YALE EXPERIMENTS 69

IV. HOW DIGESTION IS ACCOMPLISHED 95

V. HOW FOODS POISON THE BODY 113

VI. SOME IMPORTANT FOOD FACTS 127

VII. HOW OFTEN SHOULD WE EAT 145

VIII. HEALTH AND THE MIND 159

IX. THE CASE AS TO MEAT 173

X. THE CASE AGAINST STIMULANTS 193

XI. DIET REFORM IN THE FAMILY 203

XII. BREATHING AND EXERCISE 219

XIII. BATHING AND CLEANLINESS 239

XIV. A UNIVERSITY OF HEALTH 258

XV. HEALTH REFORM AND THE COMMITTEE OF ONE HUNDRED 274

Part 2

APPENDIX 287

ILLUSTRATIONS

“THE BATTLE OF THE BLOOD” FRONTISPIECE

FACING PAGE MR. UPTON SINCLAIR AND MR. MICHAEL WILLIAMS 16

MR. HORACE FLETCHER 42

MR. HORACE FLETCHER MAKING A WORLD’S RECORD 52

PROFESSOR RUSSELL H. CHITTENDEN, PH. D., LL.D., SC. D. 70

PROFESSOR IRVING FISHER, PH. D. 82

MR. JOHN E. GRANGER BREAKING THE WORLD’S RECORD FOR DEEP-KNEE BENDING 88

M. ELIE METCHNIKOFF 114

PROFESSOR LAFAYETTE B. MENDEL, PH. D. 138

MR. UPTON SINCLAIR’S CHILDREN 146

MR. SINCLAIR’S CHILDREN 176

THE DAILY SWIM 206

FRESH AIR IN BERMUDA 220

OUTDOOR EXERCISE 236

DR. J. H. KELLOGG 258

A GROUP AT THE BATTLE CREEK SANITARIUM 270

INTRODUCTION

BY UPTON SINCLAIR

Ten years ago, when I was a student at college, I fell a victim to a new and fashionable ailment called “la grippe.” I recollect the date very well, because it was the first time I had been sick in fourteen years—the last difficulty having been the whooping-cough.

I have many times had occasion to recall the interview with the last physician I went to see. I made a proposition, which might have changed the whole course of my future life, had he only been capable of understanding it. I said: “Doctor, it has occurred to me that I would like to have someone who knows about the body examine me thoroughly and tell me how to live.”

I can recollect his look of perplexity. “Was there anything the matter with you before this attack?” he asked.

“Nothing that I know of,” I answered; “but I have often reflected that the way I am living cannot be perfect; and I want to get as much out of my body and mind as I can. I should like to know, for instance, just what are proper things for me to eat——”

“Nonsense,” he interrupted. “You go right on and live as you have been living, and don’t get to thinking about your health.”

And so I went away and dismissed the idea. It was one that I had broached with a great deal of diffidence; so far as I knew, it was entirely original, and I was not sure how a doctor would receive it. All doctors that I had ever heard of were people who cured you when you were sick; to ask one to take you when you were well and help you to stay well, was to take an unfair advantage of the profession.

So I went on to “live as I had been living.” I ate my food in cheap restaurants and boarding-houses, or in hall bedrooms, as students will. I invariably took a book to the table, and ate very rapidly, even then; frequently I forgot to eat at all in the ardor of my work. I was a worshiper of the ideal of health, and never used any sort of stimulant; but I made it a practice to work sixteen hours a day, and quite often I worked for long periods under very great nervous strain. And four years later I went back to my friend the physician.

“You have indigestion,” he said, when I had told him my troubles. “I will give you some medicine.”

Part 3

So every day after meals I took a teaspoonful of some red liquor which magically relieved the distressing symptoms incidental to doing hard brain-work after eating. But only for a year or two more, for then I found that the artificially digested food was not being eliminated from my system as regularly as necessary, and I had to visit the doctor again. He gave my ailment another name, and gave me another kind of medicine; and I went on, working harder than ever—being just then at an important crisis in my life.

Gradually, however, to my great annoyance, I was forced to realize that I was losing that fine robustness which enabled me to say that I had not had a day’s sickness in fourteen years. I found that I caught cold very easily—though I always attributed it to some unwonted draught or exposure. I found that I was in for tonsilitis once or twice every winter. And now and then, after some particularly exhausting labor, I would find it hard to get to sleep. Also I had to visit the dentist more frequently, and I noticed, to my great perplexity, that my hair was falling out. So I went on, until at last I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and had to drop everything and go away and try to rest.

That was my situation when I stumbled upon an article in the Contemporary Review, telling about the experiments of a gentleman named Horace Fletcher. Mr. Fletcher’s idea was, in brief, that by thorough and careful chewing of the food, one extracted from it the maximum of nutriment, and could get along upon a much smaller quantity, thus saving a great strain upon the bodily processes.

This article came to me as one of the great discoveries of my life. Here was a man who was doing for himself exactly what I had asked my physician to do for me so many years previously; who was working, not to cure disease, but to live so that disease would be powerless to attack him.

I went at the new problem in a fine glow of enthusiasm, but blindly, and without guidance. I lived upon a few handfuls of rice and fruit—with the result that I lost fourteen pounds in as many days. At the same time I met a young writer, Michael Williams, and passed the Fletcher books on to him—and with precisely the same results. He, like myself, came near killing himself with the new weapon of health.

But in spite of discouragements and failures, we went on with our experiments. We met Mr. Fletcher himself, and talked over our problems with him. We followed the course of the experiments at Yale, in which the soundness of his thorough mastication and “low proteid” arguments were definitely proven. We read the books of Metchnikoff, Chittenden, Haig and Kellogg, and followed the work of Pawlow of St. Petersburg, Masson of Geneva, Fisher of Yale, and others of the pioneers of the new hygiene. We went to Battle Creek, Michigan, where we found a million-dollar institution, equipped with every resource of modern science, and with more than a thousand nurses, physicians and helpers, all devoting their time to the teaching of the new art of keeping well. And thus, little by little, with backslidings, mistakes, and many disappointments, we worked out our problems, and found the road to permanent health. We do not say that we have entirely got over the ill effects of a lifetime of bad living; but we do say that we are getting rid of them very rapidly; we say that we have positive knowledge of the principles of right living, and of the causes of our former ailments, where before we had only ignorance.

In the beginning, all this was simply a matter of our own digestions, and of the weal and woe of our immediate families. But as time went on we began to realize the meaning of this new knowledge to all mankind. We had found in our own persons freedom from pain and worry; we had noticeably increased our powers of working, and our mastery over all the circumstances of our lives. It seemed to us that we had come upon the discovery of a new virtue—the virtue of good eating—fully as important as any which moralists and prophets have ever preached. And so our interest in these reforms became part of our dream of the new humanity. It was not enough for us to have found the way to health for ourselves and our families; it seemed to us that we ought not to drop the subject until we had put into print the results of our experiments, so that others might avoid our mistakes and profit by our successes.

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