Fad diets and nutritional trends are not a thing of the twenty-first century as this 1845 publication, Fruits and farinacea the proper food of man. Being an attempt to prove, from history, anatomy, physiology, and chemistry, that the original, natural, and best diet of man is derived from the vegetable kingdom, demonstrates.
This 1916 Analyzing character book is interesting not only in its own right, but from a publishing history point of view. It was published in New York by the Review of Reviews Company, which was an American take on a British publishing endeavor begun by journalist W T Stead in 1890. Stead was best-known for having written a series of articles called “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” exposing the contemporary sex-trafficking trade in underage girls. One of his later projects was the Review of Reviews which ran until the mid-1930s.
Analyzing character isn’t nearly as sensational as much of Stead’s own writing, but it definitely has much the same immediate, ‘torn from the headlines’ appeal.
The psychology of advertising is probably as old as advertising itself, but the codification of it as a field of study is not. This 1915 text, Psychological advertising, offers itself as “intended for students of advertising, business men, and and all those who are interested in the commercial life of our country.”
S Weir Mitchell is probably best known as one of the major proponents of the “rest cure” in nineteenth century American medicine. This was a particularly popular treatment for well-off white women suffering from a wide variety of complaints. It involved, in its most intense form, total bed rest and a very full diet.
But Mitchell was also a novelist:
Someone went through this copy of F H Hamilton’s 1882 Health aphorisms, and an essay on The struggle for life against civilization, luxury, and æstheticism not quite with a fine-tooth comb, but definitely with a fine-point pencil. Check out page 21!
It’s getting a little late in the season on the Eastern seaboard but if you’re an enthusiastic camper, you can probably find something good in Camp fires and camp cooking, or, Culinary hints for the soldier : including receipt for making bread in the “portable field oven” furnished by the Subsistence Department from 1862.
If nothing else, who doesn’t want to try packing their pack with bricks to make an “outdoor bread oven”!
Melville C Keith’s 1882 Seven studies for young men is a handbook on the basics of physiology, sex, and “bodily hygiene” with a heavy veneer of evangelical Christiainty.
Instead of turning to a Tiktok or YouTube workout, why not try Charles Wadsworth, Jr’s 1891 How to get muscular: five addresses on higher athletics?
In 1881, the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church published a collection of reports from or about female missionary doctors who had gone to work in the MEC’s “mission fields” in India and China.
Women’s auxiliary groups to mission societies were not unusual in the United States. Many missionary groups refused to admit women or required that they form their own society; they could be associated with but not on the same level as the main (male) group. Funds raised by women’s groups, however, were often put into the coffers of the main organization. In the case of this Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, the group seems to have had funds enough to support female doctors in several locations over the course of the nineteenth century. This book provides brief biographies and outlines of the work done by each.
Despite what appears to the modern reader to be the de-valuation of women’s work in the missionary societies themselves, “women’s work for women” was seen to be a vital part of missionary outreach in the field — where there were female-only spaces, for instance in Hindu or Muslim countries, male missionaries were debarred automatically. Supporting female missionary doctors, then, was a way to approach natives on multiple fronts at the same time: not only were the women able to supply medical attention to men and women, they could also evangelize at the same time. The idea was that the ‘softening’ effect of medical treatment would allow the missionary doctor an automatic point of entry for the Christian gospel.
From Beecher’s dental directory of the United States (1888)
