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

by Upton Sinclair; Michael Williams

HOW MOUTH INFECTION SPREADS

Mouth infection, due to the teeth, sees its most critical period during that of childhood and early youth, a period in which the mouth under present conditions is almost entirely without intelligent care. Children’s mouths, says Dr. Smith, are frequently veritable crucibles in which are generated chemical agents and compounds highly detrimental to the teeth themselves, and not less to the general health of the child. The poisons arising from decaying food particles and decaying teeth themselves, vitiated salivary and mucous secretions, germ life upon the teeth and gums, and breaths loaded with emanations from stagnant septic material, all with the high temperature of ninety-eight degrees, insinuate into the general circulation of the blood a constantly increasing infection, which will later on find expression in many diseased conditions, and often in chronic and fatal disorders. It may appear, as it commonly does, in stomach or kidneys, in lungs or nervous system, in heart, brain, or skin, in any organ or tissue, indeed, to which mouth toxins are directly or indirectly conveyed. Experience has shown that it is not only possible, but entirely practicable to arrest and prevent teeth diseases in the mouths of children, and at the same time to keep the mouth aseptic or free from germ life.

Not only does an infected mouth work havoc to the body of which it is the vestibule, but it spreads disease about it. The original experiments of Koninger have shown that in a room where there is no current of air perceptible, a person coughing or sneezing can scatter germs to a distance of more than twenty-two feet. They are conveyed through the air by means of little droplets of saliva. These globules are microscopic balloons, having a bubble of air in the center, and remain in suspension but a short time. Ordinary breathing will scatter these droplets to a considerable distance, but, of course, their germ-carrying capabilities are most marked during coughing and sneezing. The more microbes the mouth contains the greater the danger of infection. Washing the mouth has the effect of decreasing the microbes of such diseases as diphtheria and consumption, and other bacilli susceptible of being scattered abroad in these salivary droplets. Placing the hand or a handkerchief over the mouth prevents the emanation of droplets charged with bacilli. So well is this fact of droplet germ infection recognized, that in many operating rooms no one present is allowed to speak during operations. Chronic headaches, neurasthenia, constipation, coughs and colds, and many other grave troubles, have all been helped and many times cured by “oral prophylaxsis” or proper mouth treatment.

The practical application of the discoveries and recommendations of the new school of dentists can be expressed very simply and briefly, and if followed out, will undoubtedly prove of tremendous service to the white cells in the battle of the blood. It must be remembered that proper mastication of food, which we have seen to be a leading principle of the new hygiene, cannot be carried out unless you have a good and healthy mouth. Five brushings a day at home is the ideal and proper care for every mouth, for those who eat through the ordinary routine of three meals a day. The first thing in the morning the teeth should be thoroughly brushed with tepid water to remove the decomposed mucous and saliva produced in the mouth during sleep. After eating the teeth should be cleansed with the help of a dentifrice. The thorough removal of grease is a chemical process, not to be accomplished by mere brushing, and therefore requires a solvent such as is contained in a good dentifrice. Such duties soon become habits; and if they are based upon common-sense, the health which they will bring will more than compensate for the trouble involved.

XIV
A UNIVERSITY OF HEALTH

There have been frequent references in this book to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and to Dr. J. H. Kellogg, its superintendent. We have written here of the art of staying well, but many people are sick, and are in need of special advice and assistance; to such we believe that we can do no greater service than to tell them of this Sanitarium and its work.

The institution is not a commercial one; its founder is one of the great humanitarians of the time, as well as one of the great scientists. None of its thousand odd men and women workers receive more than a bare living for their services, and the institution is legally so constituted that all its profits must be turned into the work. Therefore, we hold it to be a public duty to spread as widely as possible the facts relating to it. Mr. Horace Fletcher has called Battle Creek the “Mecca of Health.” More aptly still, the Sanitarium has been named a “University of Health”; and no image could be more essentially true.

Dr. J. H. Kellogg,
Of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

For, while the people at Battle Creek realize that the record of the institution for more than forty years in curing sick people is one to which they may point with pride, yet in their view this good work is but a trivial thing in comparison with their principal object, which is the conversion of those who come to them to be cured, into home teachers and missionaries of the truths of right living. It is wonderful to observe to what a great extent success has already rewarded their efforts, to see the signs which indicate the growth of public interest in their work.

Dr. Kellogg took charge of the institution which is now known as The Battle Creek Sanitarium thirty-two years ago. The institution at that time was a small two-story building, known as a water-cure or health institute, with three or four cottages and twelve patients. With the changing of the name and management, and the application of scientific methods, a new era of prosperity began, and the work has steadily progressed ever since.

The Battle Creek Sanitarium was the first attempt to assemble in one place all rational means of treating disease in combination with the regulation of diet and habits of life, and giving special emphasis to physiologic or natural methods of cure. The institution has for many years been recognized as the leading establishment of the sort in the world.

From the beginning, the Sanitarium has been non-sectarian in character. Although a deeply religious spirit pervades the place, the institution is not and never has been under the control of any denomination. For many years it was closely affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, because of the preponderance of persons belonging to this denomination among its managers and employees. For years, however, this affiliation has ceased to exist.

The institution is non-dividend paying. That is, it is a strictly altruistic or philanthropic enterprise. The charter which it received from the State requires that its earnings shall be devoted to the development of the enterprise and the maintenance of its charities. Dr. Kellogg receives no compensation for his labors in connection with the institution, and the thirty or forty physicians and business managers who are associated with him in his work likewise accept very meager compensation for their labors. Dr. Kellogg has for many years received a liberal income from the sale of his books, foods, and from his various inventions, but the income from these sources, as well as from the institution itself, has been devoted to the carrying forward of the humanitarian work to which he has devoted his life. The Haskell Home for Orphans, The Bethesda Rescue Home, the Life Boat Mission in Chicago, The American Medical Missionary College, and other charitable and philanthropic enterprises are allied enterprises which have grown out of the work which began at the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

The institution has never been endowed, and therefore, if the work was to grow, it was necessary to make money. The authors of this book have seen and read the legal documents by which Dr. Kellogg turned over to the American Missionary Association nearly everything of which he was possessed. The value of his work as a surgeon, estimated at prevailing rates for such work, would be at least fifty to sixty thousand dollars yearly. He touches not a cent of this money, nor does he touch his salary as superintendent—which he himself placed at the figure of twelve hundred dollars. There are many other physicians connected with the institution who, as specialists in New York or Chicago, would be in receipt of large incomes, but they are as content as is Dr. Kellogg to accept a bare pittance, finding their joy in the work they are doing.[3]

[3] The reader must be warned that there are many charlatans and shrewd business men who have taken advantage of the work of Dr. Kellogg and of the prestige of the name “Battle Creek.”

The energy displayed by the faculty and staff of the University of Health in carrying on their work is nothing less than astonishing. During one week when the writers were at the Sanitarium, there were more than a thousand patients all told, including the non-paying ones. There are many days when Dr. Kellogg operates from early in the morning until late at night, having very many highly difficult and dangerous operations to perform, for he is well known as a surgeon. After such a long day in the operating room, without a break for food or rest, he will give one of his lectures to the patients, or go the rounds of the wards, winding up the day by attending to a mass of business or writing or studying in his laboratories. He works continually, day in and day out, for eighteen hours a day; and this he has done for the past thirty-five years or so. He wrote one bulky book containing much technical and scientific matter in ten days, using three or four stenographers, and working in stretches of twenty hours at a time. He has never taken a holiday. All of his many journeys abroad or in this country are on matters connected with his mission in life; and while on his journeys he is continually writing or studying, and carrying on the direction of his multitudinous affairs by letter or telegraph. Yet to-day, at the age of fifty-five, he shows no signs of diminution of energy; no signs of nervous breakdown, or of the ailments which bring thousands of business men and women to him for treatment.

He himself thinks that there is nothing very remarkable in all this. He attributes it to his abstention from meat, from tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. He never eats more than one “hearty” meal a day; his second meal, when he takes one, consisting of a little fruit. His sole regret is that during the first fourteen or fifteen years of his life he ate meat. He believes that any child, if it begin right, can, when it grows up, do all that he is doing.

“I was,” he said to a friend, “a puny, undersized, ailing child; born when my father was more than fifty. It was the accepted opinion that I would not live to be a man which I fully believed. I had an appetite for knowledge and resolved that since I was to die early I must study and work very hard in order to accomplish a little something before I died. So I would study until one to three o’clock in the morning; then rise at six. From the age of ten I have fully supported myself. All this deliberate stealing of time from sleep resulted in a permanent stunting of my growth. And as I went on in life, I kept up the same habits of night work. And yet, I have only once been troubled by an illness; which came upon me a few years ago as a result of overwork. But which I got rid of; and now I am in better bodily condition than I was twenty-five years ago. But I was not handicapped by a great number of things that are bars to other workers, over which they stumble. I have slept when I could in the open air; I have drawn from air, water, light, heat, and proper exercise, the benefits that inhere in them; and I have nourished my body on wholesome foods. I mention these points with insistence—these points that seem so freakish to many people—simply because to me they are fundamental points in the physiologic, or natural, way of healing and of living.”

Dr. Kellogg publishes a big magazine of large circulation named Good Health; and in this he teaches that health is not a mere negation of ailments—a state of being free from rheumatism, or consumption, or biliousness, or any other of the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”—but that it is being wholesome, happy, sane, complete, a unit—a man or woman eating, drinking, sleeping, working, playing, functioning in all parts as naturally, as inevitably, as easily and as unconsciously, as a flower grows.

One of the writers has told of his experience many years ago, when he went to a physician and requested to be helped in keeping well. He went to Battle Creek Sanitarium on account of the illness of his wife, and when one of the physicians proposed to him that he himself undergo the treatments, he answered (having in mind this earlier experience, and of the doubts it had bred in him), “There is nothing the matter with me at present that I know of.” The answer of the Sanitarium physician was, “The less there is the matter with you the better, from our point of view.” And so he realized that at last he had found a place where his own idea of health-preservation was understood.

He accepted joyfully the offer to assist him in getting a scientific understanding of his own bodily condition. A drop of his blood was taken and analyzed, microscopically and chemically. He went to the diet table, and for three days ate precisely measured quantities of specified foods; during the period all his excretions were weighed and analyzed and examined under the microscope. A thorough physical examination was made, and also a series of tests, upon a machine invented by Dr. Kellogg, to register the strength of each group of muscles of the body. The results of all these examinations were presented to him in an elaborate set of reports and charts, together with a prescription for treatments, diet and exercise. He had stated that there was nothing the matter with him, so far as he knew. He found that anaerobes—the dangerous bacterial inhabitants of the intestinal tract—numbered something over four billion to the gram of intestinal contents—a gram being about a thirtieth part of an ounce. During the six weeks of his stay at the Sanitarium the more important of these tests were repeated weekly; and when he left, the number of anaerobes had been reduced nearly ninety per cent.

Dr. Kellogg terms the system of treatment employed by the Sanitarium the Physiologic Method, and he writes of it as follows:

“The Physiologic Method consists in the treatment of the sick by natural, physical, or physiologic means scientifically applied.

“The haphazard or empirical use of water, electricity, Swedish movements, and allied measures is not the Physiologic Method. It is no method at all. It is empiricism, at best; at its worst, it is quackery. The application of the Physiologic Method requires much more than simply a knowledge of the technique of baths, electricity, movements, etc. It requires a thorough knowledge of physiology, and an intelligent grasp of all the resources of modern medical science. For, while the Physiologic Method depends for its curative effects upon those natural agencies which are the means of preserving health, and which may be relied upon to prevent disease as well as to cure, it recognizes and employs as supplementary remedies, all rational means which have by experience been proved to be effective.

“The Physiologic Method concerns itself first of all with causes. In the case of chronic maladies, these will generally be found in erroneous habits of life, which, through long operation, have resulted in depreciating the vital forces of the body and so deranging the bodily functions that the natural defenses have been finally broken down and morbid conditions have been established.

“Chronic disease is like a fire in the walls of a house which has slowly worked its way from the foundation upward, until the flames have burst out through the roof. The appearance of the flame is the first outward indication of the mischief which has been going on; but it is not the beginning. It is rather the end of the destructive process.

“The Physiologic Method does not undertake to cure disease, but people who are diseased. It recognizes the disease process as an effort on the part of the body to recover normal conditions,—a struggle on the part of the vital forces to maintain life under abnormal conditions and to restore vital equilibrium.

“At the outset of his course of treatment, the patient is instructed that his recovery will depend very largely upon himself; that the curative power does not reside in the doctor or in the treatment, but is a vital force operating within the patient himself. The Physiologic Method is based upon this fact.

A Group at the Battle Creek Sanitarium (Dr. Kellogg on the Right).

“So the treatment of a patient consists, first of all, in the exact regulation of all his habits of life, and the establishment of wholesome conditions. The simple life and return to Nature are the ideals constantly held up before him. He must work out his own salvation; he must ‘cease to do evil and learn to do well’; he must cease to sow seeds of disease, and by every means in his power cultivate health.”

XV
HEALTH REFORM AND THE COMMITTEE OF ONE HUNDRED

We have set forth the underlying principles of the new art of health; and we have shown how these principles may be applied by individuals, and how they have been formulated and taught at the great University of Health at Battle Creek. It remains to give an account of a great national movement which has for its aim the spreading of a knowledge of the new hygiene in a semi-political way, a circumstance which to our minds proves that not only this nation but the whole of modern civilization is on the eve of a great revolution in its habits of living, and that this revolution will have for its rallying cry the word “Knowledge.” And more especially, “Knowledge of Our Bodies, and of How to Care for Them.”

The state of ignorance of the majority of people concerning the workings of their own bodies and the way to take care of them is to-day one of the greatest barriers to human progress. Few people realize that they ought to care for their bodies; or that they ought to know about their bodies until they are actually broken down. Men use their intelligence more aptly elsewhere; but all progress in other directions, in the arts and crafts and the labors of modern industry, will go for nothing if we do not learn to apply our intelligence to the matter of health.

More and more does the need for knowledge press home upon us. It is impossible for the race to survive unless that knowledge is spread. Our ancestors, it is true, knew less of their bodily make-up and bodily care than we do, but our ancestors did not need it so much. They were country dwellers, and people of the open air; they were not slaves of machinery and of office routine.

Dr. J. Pease Norton, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Yale University, recently read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a paper which vividly summed up the situation which confronts us. He said:

“There are four great wastes to-day, the more lamentable because they are unnecessary. They are preventable death, preventable sickness, preventable conditions of low physical and mental efficiency, and preventable ignorance. The magnitude of these wastes is testified to by experts competent to judge. They fall like the shades of night over the whole human race, blotting out its fairest years of happiness.

“The facts are cold and bare—one million, five hundred thousand persons must die in the United States during the next twelve months; equivalent to four million, two hundred thousand persons will be constantly sick; over five million homes, consisting of twenty-five million persons, will be made more or less wretched by mortality and morbidity.

“We look with horror on the black pages of the Middle Ages. The black waste was but a passing cloud compared with the white waste visitation. Of people living to-day, over eight million will die of tuberculosis, and the federal government does not raise a hand to help them.