The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  But Fordyce was as famous for his poor bedside manner as he was for his medical expertise. With his patients he was blunt and taciturn: A consultation usually consisted of asking his patients to stick out their tongues and have their pulses taken. “That will do,” was his usual pronouncement before writing out a prescription. Born in Aberdeen, he came from a family of high achievers: Two of his brothers were doctors, one a Presbyterian minister, one a banker, and one a professor. At fourteen he gained his MA from Aberdeen University and spent several years apprenticed to his uncle, a doctor in Rutland. Returning to Scotland, he graduated in medicine at Edinburgh when he was only eighteen. His curt manner may have been exacerbated by the tragic loss of both of his sons in childhood, one of them by drowning in the Thames. He also had two daughters, one of whom married Samuel, brother of Jeremy Bentham.

  Fordyce gave lectures that were renowned for their thoroughness—and their length. For more than thirty years, they took place each morning at his premises on the Strand. Gifted with an extraordinary memory, he began speaking, without notes, at seven in the morning, continuing until ten. In spite of his reputation for rough manners, Fordyce was elected a fellow of both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society. He knew Dr. Johnson, the artist Joshua Reynolds, and the actor David Garrick, and was happy to sit quietly in the company of livelier and more famous men, many of whom shared his passion for consuming huge quantities of food.

  Fordyce was as regular in his eating habits as in his lecture timetable. For twenty years, he dined every day at four in the afternoon at Dolly’s Chop House near St. Paul’s Cathedral. His theory, laid out in his Treatise on Digestion and Food (1791), was that people should emulate lions in the wild, eating just once a day, rather than overworking the digestive system with frequent meals. His dinner began with a tankard of strong ale, a bottle of port, and a quarter pint of brandy. The meal then gathered pace.

  For an appetizer, Dr. Fordyce usually took something light—grilled fowl or a dish of whiting. After this had been washed down with a glass of brandy, he would tuck into two pounds of prime steak accompanied by the remainder of the brandy. For dessert, he had another bottle of port, after which he set off to his home, where he would spend much of the night studying. Not surprisingly he was noted for a florid complexion—and for his scruffy appearance: He often appeared for his morning lectures in the clothes he had worn the previous day.

  Like many food theorists, Fordyce paid the price for his single-mindedness. For the last weeks of his life, he was bedridden with gout but refused to let any other doctors treat him. One night, while his daughter Maggie was reading to him, he suddenly exclaimed: “Stop! Go out of the room, I’m going to die!” And so he did.

  If Fordyce was a typical eighteenth-century trencherman, Elizabeth, Empress of Austria (1837–98) comes straight out of a nineteenth-century romantic novel. Married to Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary and mother to Crown Prince Rudolf, Elizabeth was a society beauty obsessed with her physique. Throughout her adult life she was determined to maintain her 16-inch waist, which she set off to best advantage with tight corsets that took an hour to lace up. After having three children, her waist expanded to 18 inches, but at 5 feet 8 inches tall, she never let her weight go above 105 pounds. If it exceeded that, she ate nothing but oranges until she had lost the extra ounces.

  Elizabeth was beautiful and adventurous, famed for her fearlessness on horseback and for her thick dark hair, which fell to the backs of her knees. In public, even when out riding, she carried a fan to conceal herself from sketch artists and photographers who might try to capture a view of her face for the press. Others said she did this to hide her teeth, which were always yellow.

  Born to Bavarian royalty at Possenhoffen Castle, Elizabeth was a favorite cousin of “Mad” King Ludwig II, but her outwardly pampered life was marred by tragedy. She lost her youngest daughter, Sophie, at the age of two in 1857, and in 1889 her son, Crown Prince Rudolf, committed suicide in scandalous circumstances. Apart from his body being found with his young lover Mary Vetsera, there were rumors that he had been plotting against his father.

  Elizabeth’s marriage to the emperor was further strained by the formality of the Hapsburg court, where Franz Joseph was in complete control. When he finished a course at dinner, the other diners had to put down their knives and forks, too. He was distrustful of modern inventions like telephones, cars, and trains, and said that electric light irritated his eyes. On top of that, his wife’s repeated attacks of “nerves” and her obsession with diet were a constant objection. For her part, Elizabeth hated everything to do with childbearing, and found sex with the emperor a duty rather than a pleasure. Although she bore him four children, she left them in the care of their grandmother or the servants, and found it difficult to show them affection. She confessed to a friend that only riding helped dispel her frequent bouts of depression.

  Known as Sisi to those closest to her, she generally preferred horses to people. She kept portraits of all her horses in her bedroom, describing the ones that had died as “lost friends” who were “always more loyal than human beings, and less malicious.” It was said that she “looked like an angel but rode like a devil” and she hunted all over Europe, often transporting her own mounts by ship and by rail. Fortunately, she had a personal allowance of about $7,500 per month (equivalent to almost $445,000 in today’s money) to help fund her hobby. On Corfu she built a holiday villa where she said that she wanted to live “like a student.” This was about as realistic as Marie Antoinette’s attempts to live like a shepherdess at Versailles: Elizabeth’s student digs had 128 rooms and stables for fifty horses.

  The empress seemed oblivious of the dangers of riding. She once narrowly escaped death when her horse caught its foot in the planks of a bridge over a steep gorge in the Alps. Later, attempting to vault a wall in Normandy, she was thrown and knocked unconscious, but nothing would slow her down. Riding helped her keep her slim figure—and that tiny waist. Local tailors would be summoned to sew her into her riding costume and, of course, she always watched what she ate. Staying at Combermere Abbey in Shropshire, Elizabeth required the cook to keep a supply of live turtles to make fresh soup and tubs of seawater were shipped to the house from the Welsh coast so that the Empress could have a proper bath.

  Elizabeth continued riding until she was in her late forties, after which she channeled her energies into long-distance walks, swimming, and gymnastics as well as almost ceaseless traveling, especially after the death of her son. Her fitness regime included daily visits to the gym, so she naturally had gyms built into all of her residences. One visitor described her using the rings to pull herself off the ground dressed in a black floor-length gown trimmed with ostrich feathers. At the edge of the exercise area a rope was stretched across the room, which, she said, was there “to make sure I don’t forget how to jump.”

  At state banquets, Elizabeth insisted on having only a cup of consommé, two slices of wheaten bread, and some fruit. She also irritated the emperor by skipping dinner entirely sometimes, instead retiring to her room with a glass of milk and a biscuit. When her doctors told her that she was anemic, she was persuaded to eat red meat for a time, though she soon reduced it to the juice of a rare steak and almost nothing else. One aristocrat described her as “inhumanly slender.” Her beauty treatments included vigorous massages and being wrapped in wet towels filled with seaweed. She immersed herself in baths of olive oil to smooth her skin and her magnificent hair was washed every three weeks with beer and honey. On her travels she was occasionally seen eating generous portions of cake and drinking hot chocolate, suggesting that she probably suffered from bulimia.

  After the death of her son, Elizabeth stayed out of the public eye as much as possible, usually traveling with just one lady-in-waiting. In her diary she wrote: “I wish for nothing from man kind except to be left in peace.” The crown prince’s death brought Elizabeth and Franz Joseph together in grief, and, even though they were apart
for months at a time, they corresponded daily. In one of his last letters to her, Franz Joseph poignantly wrote:

  Happiness is hardly the right word for us, we should be satisfied with a little peace, a good understanding between us and fewer misfortunes….

  He did not get his wish. In September 1898 Elizabeth was stabbed in the heart by an Italian anarchist as she boarded a ferry on Lake Geneva. Luigi Lucheni had traveled to Geneva to assassinate the Duke of Orleans but couldn’t find him. Hearing that empress was in the vicinity he took his chance, saying afterward: “I wanted to kill a royal, it didn’t matter which one.” As Elizabeth lay dying, a doctor forced a sugar lump soaked in brandy between her lips, an ironic final touch for a woman who today would have been diagnosed as suffering from an eating disorder. Always destined to play the tragic heroine, a few days earlier she had confided to her companion, Countess Sztaray, that she felt “a vast longing to lie in a good large coffin and simply find rest, nothing but rest.”

  Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) had a simple slogan: “Eat what the monkey eats, simple food and not too much of it.” His advice went against the grain for large numbers of his fellow Americans, who were then, as now, fond of red meat and white bread. Concerned with the dangers of constipation and a “slow colon,” Kellogg advised that healthy people should give themselves enemas at least three times each week. He published more than fifty books, many of them alerting the public to the dire consequences of masturbation—or “self-pollution,” as he called it—lest it make them idle, spotty, and depressed, and in the case of boys, stunt their height. At 5 feet 4 inches, perhaps he knew something he wasn’t telling. Although Kellogg and his wife, Ella, fostered forty-two children and adopted seven of them, they never had sex. On his wedding night, he sat up into the small hours working on one of his most successful books, Plain Facts for Old and Young, a treatise on healthy living based on the suppression of sexual urges. Kellogg was a virgin when he died, aged almost ninety-two.

  As a young man John Harvey was chosen by Ellen G. White, the founder of Seventh-Day Adventism, to help run the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan, which she had founded in 1866. Recognizing Kellogg as energetic and a fast learner, she subsidized his study of medicine in New York. One of her beliefs was that vegetarianism was part of the path to enlightenment. Studying at Bellevue Hospital, Kellogg had a strict breakfast regime of seven water biscuits and an apple, with the weekly luxury of a coconut and very occasionally some oatmeal or potatoes. However, he struggled to buy healthy grains and cereals that were easy to prepare and, returning fully qualified to Battle Creek in 1876, he set out to develop simple foods that opened up the bowels at least three times a day. From these experiments emerged granola and, in due course, the world’s most popular breakfast cereal, Kellogg’s cornflakes.

  Battle Creek’s three principles were exercise, diet, and purging the body of impurities. But Kellogg was also a skilled surgeon, performing more than twenty thousand operations during his career—as many as twenty-five a day at his peak—and he was still operating at the age of eighty-eight. Trained as a gynecologist, he also specialized in removing hemorrhoids. Patients on the table received a cleansing enema of lukewarm water, and to reduce postoperative shock, their beds were packed with warm sandbags. Kellogg also sprinkled lactose on their wounds to prevent infection. Although he kept his patients confined to bed immediately after surgery, he believed in exercise to aid recovery, sometimes stimulating their muscles with painless electric shocks.

  John Harvey Kellogg’s younger brother, William, began as his assistant, but was to go on to found the family cereal empire, originally called the Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company. Although John Harvey recognized that the sanatorium needed to function as a business, he didn’t like the idea of using his methods for commercial gain. William was more practical and—crucially—was willing to add sugar to the cornflakes to make them more palatable to a wider market. The Kellogg brothers fell out over this and didn’t speak to each other for the last thirty years of their lives. While William became a wealthy man, John Harvey plowed his salary back into running the sanatorium and endowing hospital beds in India and China. The royalties from his books were used to feed and clothe his enormous brood of foster children.

  As well as abstaining from red meat, John Harvey Kellogg advocated fresh air and the consumption of nuts, even writing a paper titled “Nuts May Save the Race.” He was an early proponent of yogurt and tofu and, long before Jane Fonda was born, a believer in exercising to music in order to relieve boredom. Columbia Records issued a set of five phonograph records to accompany his booklet on exercise. Kellogg also dabbled in eugenics (improving human health and intelligence by selective breeding) and was a founder of the “Race Betterment Foundation.”

  Many of Kellogg’s theories, once thought to be outlandish, have since been vindicated. He was one of the first doctors to campaign against smoking. He argued that cow’s milk was unsuitable for invalids and that salt should not be added to food, and he was one of the first to state that a diet high in animal fats and dairy products was ultimately unhealthy. He also recognized that vegetable oils were preferable to lard, suet, and butter. His system of Biologic Living was aimed at promoting “good digestion, sound sleep, a clear head, a placid mind and joy to be alive.” Part of that system involved sleeping outdoors “watching the squirrels gamboling” and relying on fruit, nuts, and berries for sustenance, a simple life that Kellogg said would allow people “to listen to the music of the spheres.” He applied his theories to his own life, getting by on four hours’ sleep a night and staying fit and healthy until he succumbed to pneumonia at ninety-one.

  The founder of another, even more successful, American business dynasty also paid close attention to diet and exercise. At the age of seventy-five Henry Ford (1863–1947) could still do handstands. In his late fifties he impressed friends by leaping into the air and kicking a cigar off the mantelpiece. He attributed his physical fitness to avoiding anything that might poison his body. Like Kellogg, he saw white bread as a major enemy and sternly warned his friends and associates against it. He always drank his water warm, believing that the body wasted energy heating it up if it were drunk cold. He never took sugar because he thought the sharp edges on the crystals were like pieces of glass that could damage internal organs, until it was pointed out to him that the crystals dissolve when wet.

  For a time in the 1920s Ford tried eating only wheat—which he held to be a miracle food. His doctor told him he was starving to death; this was demonstrated by experimenting with pigs fed only wheat. When they almost died, Henry was persuaded to vary his diet. In 1926 he decided that carrots were a magical cure-all and devised a meal made up of fourteen different carrot recipes. In 1927 he announced that pigs, cows, and chickens would soon be “redundant” because he was working on a biscuit made of wheat germ, oatmeal, pecan, and olive oil that would be sufficient for all human dietary needs. The “wonderfood” biscuit never went into mass production but that didn’t stop Ford’s relentless dietary experimentation. No one was spared. Businessmen and friends invited to lunch at Ford’s mansion near Detroit were faced with what Ford called “roadside greens,” including stewed burdock and soybean-bread sandwiches with a filling of milkweed.

  This attitude to food reveals much about Ford’s attitude to life in general. For him, control was of paramount importance. In Brave New World (1932) the state religion is called Fordism: Aldous Huxley saw that Ford’s working methods were as much to do with social manipulation as economic freedom. Ford’s mission in life was to make the process of making things more efficient. He thought that the key to human happiness was productivity and that anything that interfered with it—war, organized religion, financiers, trade unions, bad diet—was to be resisted.

  It was an insight that changed the world. What we now call the consumer society was practically invented by Henry Ford: The idea that we “consume” goods in the same way we consume food was enti
rely new. The first recorded use of the word consumer in this way was in a Sears Roebuck catalog of 1896. Ford found his métier, aged fifteen, when he discovered that he had a gift for taking watches apart and putting them back together again. By the age of thirty he was chief engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit. Ford idolized Edison and worked hard in the temple of electricity, but with typical single-mindedness and self-belief, in his spare time he was developing an entirely different source of power: the gasoline engine. In 1896 he unveiled his crude first “horseless carriage.” It was called the Quadricycle because it used four bicycle wheels and was driven by a chain. In an uncharacteristic example of poor planning, the finished version was too large to get out of the workshop and Ford had to improvise a larger doorway using an ax. But Edison was impressed and urged him on:

  We do not know what electricity can do, but I take for granted that it cannot do everything. Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you are after, I can see a great future.

  Two years later Ford left to set up his own business. In 1903 he personally broke the world land-speed record in a car called the 999, reaching 91 miles per hour on the frozen surface of Lake Saint Clair near Detroit. Impressive though this was, the “motor car” was easily dismissed as a plaything for the well off, expensive to make and to buy. But Ford had other ideas. His invention of the assembly line simplified the manufacturing process, keeping costs down and radically reducing production times. But the real stroke of genius was to do this while also keeping down the price to the buyer. Every worker was a potential customer and the profits would come from volume. It worked. In 1908 the first Model T Fords began rolling off the line, priced at $825 dollars. By 1914 the price had fallen to $360 (equivalent to a very affordable $7,000 at today’s prices). By 1918 half the cars in America were Model Ts, and when production finally stopped a decade later, 15 million had been produced—more than any other car except for the Volkswagen Beetle.