The Background
The following article was published in The Atlanta Journal in 1893, and written by W.W. Goodrich, an architect who practiced in Atlanta between 1889 and 1895.
Like any self-respecting architect, Goodrich considered himself an expert on, well, just about everything. Here, he pontificates on the health and dietary habits of 19th-century Americans in a condescending and frequently offensive diatribe that begins by dismissing vegetarians as “fanatics” while also scolding “the rich” for “the excessive use of meats.”
Sounding every bit like a shill for the dairy industry, Goodrich spends the bulk of the article extolling the alleged benefits of drinking milk, with a string of dubious assertions unsupported by modern science. Everything from fever to liver failure could be cured with a “milk regimen” he explains, as practiced by “certain savage or semi-civilized tribes of pastoral habits.”
Goodrich made these claims at a time when milk production was unregulated in the United States, and dairy manufacturers regularly tainted their products by dumping in everything from calf brains to formaldehyde, leading to the outbreak of multiple diseases and the poisoning deaths of thousands of Americans — primarily infants. Drink up!
As Goodrich acknowledges, tuberculosis was frequently transmitted by bacteria found in unboiled milk, a danger well known to the public by the 1890s. Here, he advocates for the pasteurization of milk, a process that was not widely employed in the United States at the time, and would not be legally required until the early 20th century.
Goodrich’s stated desire in this writing was “to infuse a little hygienic good sense into the average American” who only needed to “observe the laws of temperance.”
And as for the people of Atlanta? “Nowhere in the world is self-restraint more necessary than in Georgia”, he explains, claiming that the hot and humid climate of the Southeast both “stimulates the appetite” and “render[s] digestion difficult”.
Why ask a doctor for health advice when you can consult a third-rate architect?
Hints on Hygiene
Some Secrets of Good Health for Every Day Use by Everybody.
Written for the Journal.
If people knew how to eat and drink properly or were willing to confine themselves to articles of food suited to their digestion, and would just take the amount of exercise necessary to facilitate the digestion, the lives of the greater part of the human race would be indefinitely prolonged.
There would have to be excepted from this sweeping assertion certain diseases – like those of throat and lungs – that cannot always be avoided, but which nevertheless in many cases can be limited in their ravages by prudence.
The statement as made is a truism, and has been known to sensible persons since dawn of civilization and the origin of gormands and epicures. Some old Persian writer placed the whole secret of health in the ability to leave off eating before the appetite was entirely satisfied, and the wise men of Greece and Rome never ceased to preach similar truths, both by precept and example. These things they had learned, not from works on hygiene, which did not abound in ancient times, nor from family physicians, who were far from being plentiful as they are now but from simple observation.
The apostles of a vegetable diet have usually been fanatics, but there has always been a grain of truth in their doctrines, for it is true that the greater part of diseases are caused, especially among the rich, by the excessive use of meats.
It is only a few years since the nourishing qualities of milk and its hygienic value began to be properly appreciated. Everyone was aware that the young of the human race and of the lower animals using it as their only diet flourished and grew strong alike in bone and muscle.
It appeared to be easily digested and seemed to contain all the elements that the body seemed to need, at least in the early stages of its growth. Adults – at least those in civilized countries – despised it and would have considered themselves doomed to an early death had they found themselves confined to a milk regimen. The same opinion, has, fortunately, not prevailed among certain savage or semi-civilized tribes of pastoral habits, who have maintained a healthy existence from time immemorial on milk and its products.
Medical science, aided by chemistry, has for some years past been working a gradual change in these ancient prejudices.
The chemists have discovered that milk contains all the elements necessary to make blood, bone and muscle. It adapts itself to the most difficult digestion.
A man can live and enjoy perfect health on milk and its products alone, or his system find in it everything needful – fatty matter, caseine, albumen, and especially phosphate of lime for building up his bony framework. Doctors prescribe it for patient suffering from low fevers.
If a person finds himself suffering from torpididty of the liver, or a tendency to indigestion let him drink milk freely, say two or three quarts a day, and abstain from meat, and he will almost invariably find himself cured speedily.
It may be said of certain diseases of the liver and kidneys and of the dyspepsia that they have invariably been brought on by ignorance or disregard of the laws of hygiene, and no one need ever have them unless he is obliged to live in the tropics, or has by chance been so situated that the choice of his diet was beyond his control.
It has been in all ages of the world been difficult to make any considerable number of human beings observe the laws of temperance in eating and drinking if the means of indulgence were at their disposal.
It is much more difficult to infuse a little hygienic good sense into the average American of today than into the luxurious Roman in the time of Lucullus, and nowhere in the world is self-restraint more necessary than in Georgia, where the climate constantly stimulates the appetite, while at the same time certain latent qualities of the atmosphere seem to render digestion difficult.
While milk in its perfect state is capable of such infinite service to the health, it has at the same time an extraordinary facility in transmitting diseases. A great part of that consumed in large cities is from cows kept in stables and fed often on unwholesome food.
When tuberculosis diseases become too common among these animals the newspapers ventilate the matter and the health officers show a temporary activity, but the evil continues. It is more trying from the fact that diseased milk is largely used as nourishment for young children.
If the purity of milk is suspected, however, it only needs to be remembered that the noxious germs it contains may be destroyed by boiling. In England, where milk is rarely boiled, there have been occasional local epidemics caused by the use of milk from diseased cows.
In 1870 an epidemic of typhoid fever at Islington was propagated in this manner. Epidemics of croup and scarlatina have also in England been attributed to the same cause. The nutritive and hygienic qualities of milk and its tendency to transmit disease have for the last ten years been frequent subjects for discussion at the sessions of the Paris Academy of Medicine. The matter is sufficiently practical and important to attract the attention a little oftener of medical associations in America.
W.W. Goodrich1
References
- Goodrich, W.W. “Hints on Hygiene.” The Atlanta Journal, April 29, 1893, p. 1. ↩︎