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

by Upton Sinclair; Michael Williams

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.

Historians agree that all known civilizations, empire after empire, republic after republic, from the dawn of recorded time down to the present age, have decayed and died, through causes generated by civilization itself. In each such case the current of human progress has been restored by a fresh influx of savage peoples from beyond the frontiers of civilization. So it was with Assyria, Egypt and Persia; so Greece became the wellspring of art and the graces of life, and then died out; so Rome conquered the world, built up a marvellous structure of law, and then died out. As Edward Carpenter and others have shown us, history can paint pictures of many races that have attained the luxuries and seeming securities of civilization, but history has yet to record for us the tale of a nation passing safely through civilization, of a nation which has not been eventually destroyed by the civilization it so arduously won.

And why? Because when ancient races emerged out of barbarism into civilization, they changed all the habits of living of the human race. They adopted new customs of eating; they clothed themselves; they lived under roofs; they came together in towns; they devised ways of avoiding exposure to the sun and wind and rain—but they never succeeded in devising ways of living that would keep them in health in their new environment.

The old struggle against the forces of nature once relaxed, men grew effeminate and women weak; diseases increased; physical fibre softened and atrophied and withered away; moral fibre went the same path to destruction; dry rot attacked the foundations of society, and eventually the whole fabric toppled over, or was swept aside, to be built up again by some conquering horde of barbarians, which in its turn grew civilized, and in its turn succumbed to the virulent poison that seemed inherent in the very nature of civilization, and for which there seemed to be no antidote.

So much for the past. As to the present, there do not lack learned and authoritative observers and thinkers who declare that our own civilization is also dying out. They point out that while in many directions we have bettered our physical condition, improved our surroundings, and stamped out many virulent diseases (smallpox, the plague and yellow fever, for instance), and have reduced average mortality, nevertheless we have but exchanged one set of evils for another and perhaps more serious, because more debilitating and degenerating set: namely, those manifold and race-destroying evils known as nervous troubles, and those other evils resulting from malnutrition, which are lumped together vaguely under the name of dyspepsia, or indigestion—the peculiar curse of America, the land of the frying-pan.

It is also plain, say the critics of our civilization, that society to-day cannot be regenerated by barbarians. To-day the whole world is practically one great civilization, with a scattering of degraded and dying little tribes here and there. Modern civilization seems to have foreseen the danger of being overrun some day as the ancient civilizations were, and to have forestalled the danger by the inventions of gunpowder and rum, syphilis and tuberculosis.

Are these critics right? I believe that they are, as far as they go; I believe that to-day our civilization is rapidly degenerating; but also I believe that it contains within itself two forces of regeneration which were lacking in old societies, and which are destined ultimately to prevail in our own. The first of these forces is democracy, and the second is science.