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Apostles of Abstinence: Fasting and Masculinity during the Progressive Era

BY THE TIME CHARLES COURTNEY HASKELL PUBLISHED HIS AMBITIOUSLY TITLED Perfect Health: How To Get It and How To Keep It in 1901, Americans were long acquainted with health reformers. The hygienic regimens of English physicians George Cheyne (1671–1743) and William Lambe (1765–1847), not to mention John Wesley’s own Primitive Physick (1747), were widely known well into the nineteenth century. The various therapy systems of later American reformers such as William Alcott, Sylvester Graham, Russell Trall, Elizabeth Blackwell, John Harvey Kellogg, Ellen Gould White, and Horace Fletcher were similarly celebrated, attracting frequent imitators and in some cases achieving considerable popularity. Vegetarianism, hydropathy, exercise, temperance, and pulverizing mastication had been so ardently advocated between the 1830s and the 1890s that desirous (if worn) consumers must have wondered whether the farthest reaches of nonpharmaceutical therapy systems had not been scoured; surely Americans had, by now, heard it all. But, thanks to a fortuitous encounter with physician Edward Hooker Dewey, whose own books excoriated the heavy American breakfast and plied abstinence as a cure-all remedy, Haskell managed to seize upon what he would help make into the greatest fitness craze of the early twentieth century, a practice whose popularity matched, if not surpassed, all previous health regimens: fasting.