In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Western world went through a period of preoccupation with wellness. People took up vegetarianism, nudism, spiritualism, and the consumption of patent medicines with whopping narcotic content. If Lydia Pinkham’s couldn’t cure your hiccups, there were spas and sanatoriums aplenty, many of them with a comic level of preoccupation with excretion. Turn of the century sanatorium life was satirized in T.C. Boyle’s 1994 novel The Road to Wellville, which was based on the cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, as well as my old favorite The Magic Mountain. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all opium and sitz baths. Unscrupulous quacks preyed on rich hypochondriacs, convincing them that they were hysterical or consumptive or just plain constipated. In the worst-case scenario, “taking the cure” could be fatal. In 1911 two British heiresses, both of them convinced that their digestive systems were on the verge of complete collapse, checked into a sanatorium in Washington State to undergo Dr. Linda Hazzard’s extraordinary “fasting cure”, which consisted of not eating anything. Predictably, one of the sisters died after a few months of treatment, and the other was forcibly removed, still convinced that her system was unable
