Horace Fletcher - The New Glutton or Epicure

The several extracts from the letters of Drs. Kellogg and Dewey; the statement relative to an endurance-test made on the author's fiftieth birthday, on a bicycle in France, volunteered by Edward W. Redfield, last year's Medal-of-Honorist at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, as well as medalist of last Exposition Universale, Paris; are appreciated and accepted for the subject they endorse; and, as before stated, are entirely impersonal. Instead of using dumb animals for test subjects and getting their unwilling, and sometimes abnormally deranged, participation, the author takes pleasure in submitting to the tests himself, and is thus able to state "symptoms" and "feelings" more accurately, perhaps, than any dog could do. Were vivisection necessary the author would willingly submit to that inconvenience also; but thanks to the skill of a Pawlow, and the ingenuity of a Bowditch coupled with the patience and persistence of a Cannon, as fully related in the "A.B. – Z.," we not only get the economic results but we are able to know and even see some of the "reasons for things" as well.

Interesting testimony and comment relative to the present study will be found at the end of the volume in communications from Commandante Cesare Agnelli, Clarence F. Low, Esquire, Baron Randolph Natili, and one of unusual suggestiveness, as evidence of the need of further study of nutrition, from Dr. Hubert Higgins of Cambridge, England.

With the evidence and interest just outlined, it was not difficult for the author to enlist the coöperation of Surgeon-General O'Reilly of the United States Army and the endorsement of General Leonard Wood for larger investigation of the subject. These officers, both of them surgeons and medical doctors, had supported the militant-martyr-scientist, Dr. Major Walter Reed, in his great sanitary accomplishment; had fought yellow fever to a finish together in Cuba; had traced its spread to a specific cause; and were thereby encouraged to tackle even so common and powerful enemies as Indigestion and Mal-Assimilation.

The investigation now in progress at Yale University, under the direction of Professor Chittenden and under the fostering auspices of the Trustees of the Bache Fund , which is administered by the National Academy of Sciences, and other contributed support, is a Militant-Scientific campaign which will not cease until we know as much about human nutrition, at least, as we know about the nutrition of our domestic animals.

In this little book, however, is an account of the first distress and war cry, (to appropriate an expression of the Salvation Army), and while the workers in Science may take a considerable time to make observations and investigate the "reasons for things," the underlying claims herein stated will, it is believed, ultimately be established as fundamental facts of both Hygiene and Physiology.

The psychic factor in digestion is even more important than originally claimed by the author, and fully accounts for the strength attained by the Christian Science movement.

In the "A.B. – Z. of Our Own Nutrition" are reprinted, for recent scientific reports, in addition to the papers of Dr. Van Someren and Professor Chittenden, before mentioned, articles and lectures by Dr. Professor Pawlow, the great Russian physiologist and one of the Board of Assessors in the International Nutrition Investigation, described in the "A.B. – Z.," (reprinted from the fine English Translation by Dr. W. H. Thompson, of Trinity College, Dublin; English publishers, Griffin & Co.; American publishers, Lippincott & Co.), on the mental influence over the salivary, gastric, and intestinal secretions. Also, nearly an hundred pages of most virile, readable, and important "Observations on Mastication," by Dr. Harry Campbell, M.D., F.R.C.P., of the North-west London Hospital; reprinted by courteous permission of the author and of the editor of the Lancet . Also, a description of the digestive process in animals as seen by aid of the Röntgen, or X-Ray; a most readable account of the infinite patience and application of Dr. W. B. Cannon, of the Harvard Medical School, devoted to learning the "reasons for things" done in the closed and secret laboratory of the stomach and intestines.

The above is a necessary advertisement of another volume in the A.B.C. Life Series; because the details of this particular attempt to reduce the philosophy of every-day life to profitable simples is linked-up in several volumes developed in the course of study of the subject for location of the germinal causes.

"Menticulture" was the first of the series and relates to the individual. "Happiness" came next and located the chief enemy of happiness in Fearthought , the unprofitable element of forethought. "That Last Waif" treated the question as related to the Social Whole, children in particular, and recommended Social Quarantine ; by extension of infant education to the extreme of allowing no child to escape educational care. This present treatise deals with the first requirement of such infantile care and education, right feeding.

The great Battle Creek Sanitarium, under the inspiration and direction of Dr. J. H. Kellogg, has grown to enormous proportions in thirty-seven years. It began with one patient in a two-storey frame house in a country village, and has been largely influential in creating the present proud distinction of Battle Creek, Michigan, with its millions upon millions of invested industrial capital.

The "cure" is based upon the establishment in the patient of right nutrition, right functioning of the bodily organs and secretions, and thereby assisting Nature to perform the cure in a natural manner. Pure foods and other conditions of right nutrition have been the particular study of the institution staff, and large and finely furnished chemical and bacteriological laboratories have been installed for the study of nutrition in a scientific manner.

The Battle Creek Sanitarium is a purely humanitarian and philanthropic institution. By perpetual charter, all of the profits of the concern in all of its ramifications are dedicated to the extension of the American Medical Missionary Cause, and there have been already established more than sixty branches of the parent institution in different parts of the world, principally in or near the chief cities of America, and all are occupied with saving and regenerating the physical body of the sick as a foundation for possible moral awakening and spiritual cultivation.

The work done by these humanitarian institutions is most practical, and the best evidence of the practicality is their growth. Patients are charged what they can conveniently pay, but none who need are refused attention. Branches are made self-supporting as soon as possible, but are first nurtured by the parent sanitarium. There are some hundreds of physicians, nurses, and other attachés of the different institutions, and these are enthusiasts in the humanitarian work, taking as wages only what they need for most economical support, "a mere pittance," and deriving their chief compensation from satisfaction gained in the service. All in all, it is an expression of inspirational altruism worthy of the example of the Good Samaritan and a practical demonstration of the Sermon on the Mount.

The special attention of the writer was called to the work of the Battle Creek Sanitarium organisation by an American banker, Edwin C. Nichols, Esquire, in London, at the time of the last Coronation. The banker was conversant with the growth and methods of the Sanitarium, and had seen the result of its missionary and sanitary work. He exacted a promise from the writer to visit Battle Creek on his first opportunity, and Mr. Nichols has our everlasting gratitude for leading us to a more intimate acquaintance with so splendid an illustration of humanitarian possibilities when properly directed. It is not alone the great Sanitarium and its hospitals, and clinics, and shelters, and refuges, and baths, and reading-rooms, that are doing the greatest possible good work, in demonstrating their effective Christianity; but it is the private waif-family of Dr. and Mrs. Kellogg which shows what neglected children are capable of when given a chance, and which appeals to the author especially as giving support to his ideal of a possible effective Social Quarantine as presented in his book, "That Last Waif." Twenty-four neglected and sick children of unfortunate parents have been rescued from an almost hopeless condition, and have been adopted into the best of surroundings and culture, all promising to become splendid wealth-productive citizens and ornaments to society.