VII
By the end of the summer my health was too bad to tell about, and I had got my thoughts centered on a new remedy, a fast cure. I had been reading Physical Culture magazine, and I wrote to Bernarr Macfadden, who was then running a rival institution to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He invited me to bring my family and let him have a try at my problem.
Athlete, showman, lecturer, editor, publisher, and health experimenter—I could make B. M. the subject of an entertaining essay, but there is not space here. To the high-brows he was a symbol of the vulgarity and cheapness of America. And it won’t help for me to defend him, because I may also be on that list. I merely state what Macfadden did for me—which was to teach me, free, gratis, and for nothing, more about the true principles of keeping well and fit for my work than all the orthodox and ordained physicians who charged me many thousands of dollars for not doing it. Believe me, I went to the best there were in every field, and while some of them had mercy on a writer, others treated me like a millionaire. I number many doctors among my friends, and the better they know me, the more freely they admit the unsatisfactory state of their work. Leo Buerger, a college mate who became a leading specialist in New York, summed the situation up when I mentioned the osteopaths, and remarked that they sometimes made cures. Said my eminent friend: “They cure without diagnosing, and we diagnose without curing.”
My visit to Macfadden took place in 1909—back in the dark ages, before the words “preventive medicine” had ever been joined together. I had asked doctor after doctor to advise me how to keep well, and not one of them seemed to know what I was talking about; they attempted to cure my sickness, and then they sent me away to go on doing the things that had brought the sickness on. The secrets of natural living were the property of a little group of adventurous persons known as “health cranks”; and it has been my pleasure to watch the leading ideas of these “cranks” being rediscovered one by one by medical authority, and so made known to the newspapers and the public. It was not Dr. Auguste Rollier of Switzerland who invented the sun cure; no indeed, the semilunatics of Physical Culture City were going around in breechclouts, men and women getting themselves arrested by rural constables, before ever the word Nacktkultur was imported.
The same thing is true of vitamins, and of the evils of denatured foods, and the importance of bulk in the diet—we knew all that before Sir Arbuthnot Lane ever addressed a medical congress. As to fasting, I stood the ridicule of my medical friends for twenty years, and then in the files of the Journal of Metabolism I found the records of laboratory tests upon humans as well as dogs proving that the effect of a prolonged fast is a permanent increase in the metabolic rate—which is the same thing as rejuvenation, and exactly what we “health cranks” have claimed.