THE STAFF OF DEATH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 38

down the East Coast. Even after his death in 1850, controversy raged about what an autopsy revealed
about the condition of his intestines.
Before all that, though, Sylvester Graham was the seventeenth son of an elderly father and an insane
mother, born sickly and not expected to thrive. As a child he showed signs of consumption. As a youth
he suffered general physical debility, nervous exhaustion, and “sensitivity.” But, after an apparent break-
down in his late twenties, Graham retreated to Rhode Island where he embraced a strict dietary regimen
and miraculously recovered. In his triumph over infirmity, Graham found religion—not just the Protest-
ant creed he had studied at Amherst College, but also a deep and abiding physiological faith, a fervently
optimistic belief that disease was a choice and that anyone could achieve health as he had.
Armed with this conviction, Graham entered public life in the late 1820s, against a background of
social upheaval and flourishing fervor for reform. Like many health crusaders of the time, Graham em-
barked on his activist journey through the temperance movement, which served as a stepping-stone into
a web of reform-minded networks including abolition, suffrage, transcendentalism, vegetarianism, and
animal rights. Exposed to this wide range of commitments, Graham came to believe that diet held the
key to them all.
Under the influence of increasingly popular critics of early nineteenth-century “heroic medicine,”
with its affection for bloodletting and mercury purgatives, Graham believed, not without cause, that
health was best achieved by avoiding doctors. As part of a larger religious current sweeping Jacksonian
America, Graham combined evangelical revival with scientific study of the body. Called “Christian
physiology” by historians of religion, this was not faith healing, but rather a conviction that all disease
arose from a failure to conform one's bodily habits to the Laws of Nature, a scientific order designed
by the Creator. 16 Under the influence of the celebrated French physiologist François Broussais's “gast-
roenterological theory,” Graham's particular version of Christian physiology located humans' primary
connection to Nature and Creator in the alimentary tract.
More specifically, Graham imagined the body as a network of fibers radiating out from the intestines,
connecting and feeding every organ. Ingesting “stimulating” food and drink—particularly animal flesh,
white bread, alcohol, caffeine, and spices—irritated and inflamed those fibers from the gut outward,
producing overall ill health. On the other hand, because all health was connected to the gut, cooling the
body's fibers through bland, disciplined eating could cure any ill. Avoiding stimulating foods was, Gra-
ham proclaimed, “nothing less than the application of Christianity to the physical condition and wants
of man … the means which God has ordained for the redemption of the body.” 17 Even the worst cases
of bodily derangement could be eased by an ascetic diet of whole wheat bread and water.
For Graham, health and bodily inflammation were more than physiological. Central to Christian
physiology was the conviction that careful study of scientific law would inevitably confirm biblical law
and vice versa. God created Nature, therefore Nature—the workings of human physiology—must logic-
ally work according to the laws of God. And because particularly vital fibrous connections linked the
intestines, genitals, and brain together in “morbid sympathy,” intestinal inflammation also held the key
to the nation's moral health. In this holistic view, the maintenance of individual health and moral virtue
went together. Thus, Graham's best-selling Lecture to Young Men on Chastity famously blamed mas-
turbation for a long list of civic woes. But the compulsion to masturbate itself arose out of poor physical
hygiene and diet. Even chaste youths resisting “the solitary vice” with all their might could not triumph
against “involuntary nighttime emissions” unless they harmonized their bodies with Nature through aus-
tere eating. 18
In a social milieu crowded with competing health gurus, Graham's big break came in the form of a
global cholera pandemic that reached the United States via Canada in 1832. 19 As the disease radiated