Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene (review)

The nine contributions to this volume stem from a conference and exhibit on the history of the dissemination of health advice to the public through print. Focusing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, the book is an exploration of both the history of popular health education and the history of print culture. Domestic medicine manuals, primers on morality, guides to etiquette, even handbills and posters are examined by the various authors as sources of guidance as to how one should live if health is to be enjoyed. Particularly engaging is Thomas Horrocks's discussion of the evolution of the almanac as a handbook of health. Initially a medium for reinforcing Puritan doctrine, the almanac expanded to include not only the agricultural, astronomical, and meteorological information commonly associated with that literary category, but also astrology, literature, humor, recipes both culinary and medicinal—and, not least, instruction in hygiene. In that last regard, almanacs were especially influential during the antebellum era, but then they succumbed to the competition of newspapers and magazines and were reduced to the level of advertising vehicles for proprietary medicines.

In happier days, almanac publishers had pressed the principles of correct hygiene upon their readers as much for the health of their souls as their bodies, and that dual meaning of "right living" resonated through the other forms of printed health guides as well. Steven Shapin's fascinating exposition of "How to Eat Like a Gentleman" combs the pages of "courtesy books"—works written by established gentlemen to educate those who hoped to become gentlemen—to illuminate the links between diet and deportment in early modern England. Right eating, one learns, was critical to reputation because the health it conferred was a public display of self-respect, self-restraint, and wisdom—in short, of virtue and good breeding; concomitantly, it gave its possessor the vigor and longevity needed to successfully discharge the duties to God and country expected of a true gentleman.

As one would expect of a book dealing with "right living" and the moral implications and consequences of daily habits, sexual hygiene receives the lion's share of attention. Mary Fissell leads readers through the maze of Masterpiece and like-titled works associated with the name of Aristotle that served from the seventeenth into the twentieth century as a fount of sexual knowledge for the common folk. Ronald Numbers explains how John Harvey Kellogg, America's most prominent health reformer from the 1880s into the 1920s, elaborated the vision-derived sexual taboos of Seventh-Day Adventist church leader Ellen White into the most widely read sex manual of its day, a tome preoccupied with eliminating masturbation.

Kellogg and nearly all other would-be health instructors advocated a sexual regimen that was in accord with their interpretation of Christian doctrine: indulgence only within the bounds of wedlock, only for procreation, and only very infrequently. But Thomas Low Nichols, a mid-nineteenth-century hydropath, preached that health demanded "free love," the freedom of women in particular to choose sexual partners on the basis of "passional attractions" (p. 190) instead of matrimony. In her analysis of Nichols's Esoteric Anthropology, Jean Silver-Isenstadt demonstrates how commitment to a radical political stance could lead to even more radical positions on the rules of health.

There are chapters as well on traditional home health guides (Charles Rosenberg), on books of advice to new mothers (Kathleen Brown), on domestic medicine as adapted to the distinctive environment and social structure of the American South (Steven Stowe), and on the advertising of health information through illustrated posters (in which William Helfand provides an interesting discourse on the development of chromolithography). Running through all contributions...