The Pursuit of Perfection

There Seems To Be some about where American civilization is goiug,. but there need l>e none. American civilization is going where it has always gone — to the drugstore. With'pilJ. potion and devout wish, most of the nation is, as usuaJ, striving alter superhuman levels of physical, mental and emotional felicity. Americans continue to be obsessed with the conviction that they owe it to themselves to look better than possible, feel better than possible and function better than possible. And what are the criteria of perfection- Se\emeen-jewel bowels, dazzling comeliness, infinite sexual stamina and a wide-awake bloodstream fortified with iron. And how may (continued on page 108) Perfection (continued from page 91) they be attained? With stomach-sweeteners, blood-purifiers, kidney-flushers, liver-arousers and gonad-stimulators, with an array of miraculous medicaments and hopeful suppositions that would make a Baluba witch doctor bilious with envy.

In the year 1961, during what is often called medicine's Golden Age, twenty-five billion dollars will be spent in this country on concoctions to be sniffed, swallowed and smeared without benefit of physician. Despite the grosses upon grosses of greenbacks being fed into the flame of the health deity, however, it is not burning as colorfully as it once did in the Western world. Gone are the Carminative Wind-Expelling Pills, the name of which may have been offensive to Eighteenth Century British bluenoses, but which made everybody else feel swell. Nobody nowadays offers to cure Defluxions of Rheum. It is impossible to obtain Freeman's Grand Restorer of Human Nature, that nonpareil remedy for "Horrid thoughts, Startings in the Sleep and Decay of Nature." We have to get along without Molyneux's Smelling Medicine, which protected the British Isles and their colonies from "scurvy, pimpled faces, bald heads and all cutaneous eruptions by smelling only."

Although, as we shall see, today's health seekers can get quite an assort-ment of pepper-uppers, they may have trouble finding Cordial Quintessence of Vipers, a drink that worked wonders for romantic Englishmen during the reign of George III. An ad of the time promised: "A few days of it give such a general warmth, and so exceedingly delight the Vital and Animal Spirits, Senses and Nerves, as soon to show what it will do upon a little continuance of it; for it not only promotes and prompts Desire, but also furnishes proper matter for the Support and Establishment of a true and lasting Power and Inclination."

Midway through the next century, British readers were regaled with this lively jingle in behalf of another alleged restorer of the Vital and Animal Spirits:

Lucina Cordial!— Barren wives

It turns to mothers fair.

And the fond name of fathers gives

To husbands in despair.

Man's quest for vitality goes back at least to the ancient Greeks who diagnosed lassitude or discouragement as "tired blood" and cured it by swallowing water enriched with rust from old iron swords. People are still making the same diagnosis but are attacking the ailment more appetizingly with a widely and politely advertised product called Geri-tol, which contains vitamins and iron in ) 2-percent (24 proof) alcohol. Physicians say the success of the treatment is related to the fact that lassitude and discourage-ment are often helped by a shot of 24-proof alcohol. They take less kindly to the advertiser's suggestion that this depressing condition may sometimes be caused by iron-deficiency anemia, a rare illness that requires a quality of diag-nosis and treatment few television announcers are able to provide.

Be that as it may, alcoholic tonics have been the very blood and bone of American self-medication for at least a hundred and fifty years, and one shrinks from equating a nicely-nicely beverage like Geritol with the rousing mixtures of more vigorous days. A nip or two of one of those grand old drinks gave the world an entirely new and altogether more pleasing aspect. The repeal of Prohibition cut sharply into the business, but there was a time when even the most passionate champions of abstinence used a little Peruna (56 proof), Hostet-ter's Bitters (94 proof) or Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound (30 proof) to drive away the chill of hopelessness, sooth the nerves and get some wholesome herbs into the system. It is, perhaps apocryphally, reported that in a euphoric hour, one stage beauty wrote the following testimonial: "Dear Mrs. Pinkham, I have taken three bottles of your Lydia Pinkham Compound and feel like a new man."

The best excuse for self-medication with those potent tonics was that a man might just as well die plastered as die sad. Few of the Nineteenth Century beverages were lethal and none of the present weak imitations is even harmful, but most physicians have always been opposed to them. The doctors advance the dreary view that people with, for instance, cancer should go see a doctor. In deference to such spoilsports, the law has watered down both the alcoholic content and medicinal claims of liquid cure-alls. But a smart shopper can still obtain bottled health of gratifying potency. An example is Old Hinkley's Bone Liniment, which at last reports was still on sale in the Michigan lumber country. Old Hinkley's has been a blessing to weary loggers from the moment it was introduced in 1856. It used to feature 172-proof alcohol — 86 percent, if you please — and, as any user could testify, was able to penetrate to the very bone of the consumer, whether used internally or externally. In addition to soothing aching muscles, it was great for hangovers. In 1918 an unimaginative Federal Government required that the word "Bone" be edited out of the name, and compelled the manufacturer to cut the alcohol to 94 proof. At that strength Old Hinkley's is still an invigorating drink, if you can stand the taste.

The shabbiest trick ever played by officialdom on the devotees of a popular alcoholic medicine involved one of the most popular and most alcoholic of all, Peruna. According to its inventor, Samuel B. Hartman, M.D., this priceless 56-proof potion was the cure for catarrh which, he further revealed, was the cause of every known human ailment. Thus, by extension, Peruna could cure anything. Some cynics who suspected that the only affliction Peruna could relieve was thirst persuaded the government to pass a Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, and Dr. Hartman was told that he had better put some medicine in his medicine or open a bar. That was the beginning of the end. For reasons never understood by his admirers, who had been enjoying the beverage by the tot rather than by the tablespoon, Dr. Hartman acceded to the government's whim and added a laxative to the Peruna mix. The results were catastrophically therapeutic. The Peruna business went into swift, irreversible decline, although Dr. Hartman himself managed to keep body and soul together and, in fact, finally left fifty million dollars in Peruna proceeds to the Columbus, Ohio, Gallery of Fine Arts.

After World War II the tonic industry enjoyed a rebirth under the leader-ship of an ebullient Louisiana state senator named Dudley LeBlanc, inventor of Hadacol. Groucho Marx once asked the jolly legislator what the stuff was good for and LeBlanc answered, "It was good for about five and a half mil-lion dollars for me last year."

Despite the various malt, sulphur, castor oil, ox-blood, iron, sassafras and rhubarb preparations that are forced into the mouths of rural children in the springtime, and despite vestigial brands of medicinal schnapps like Old Hinkley's or Black-Draught (an honorable Southern nostrum that, after years on the hip, has become nonalcoholic) and weak substitutes like Geritol, the tonic trade is not what it once was. This is not to say that money which used to go for drinks has been withdrawn from circulation or is being spent on medical care or for some other radical purpose. As a matter of fact, more money than was ever paid out for the good old tonics is now being used to buy the up-to-date, easy-to-take and extremely boring successors to tonics — the vitamin and mineral preparations. These pellets are the high-power additives of today's Pursuit of Perfection.

But the most dedicated health-hunters do not limit their body-building, innard-fortifying quest to the vitamin-mineral supplements, in addition to going to the drugstore, America is also going to the health-food shoppe. Food appears on this nation's tables each day in a richness and profusion unequaled in the history of mankind, but our countrymen leave nothing to chance. For (continued on page 160) Perfection (continued from page 108) decades they have been mistrustful of normal, good-tasting food, and have taken measures to protect themselves against it. "You Are What You Eat" runs their slogan, and considering what a lot of people are, it is easy to conclude that their diets are calamitous. Various explanations are given for the inadequacies of ordinary food, depending on which health swami happens to have caught the public imagination at the moment, but the most popular theories have tended to perch on such roosts as the supposed shortcomings of modern agriculture, the failure to plan meals strategically, the neglect of certain wonder foods, the destruction of nutrients in commercial food-processing plants or in domestic cook-pots, and the loss of nourishment through improper chewing.

Back in the Twenties, for example, dear old father, the autocrat of the household, used to Fletcherize his Hay Diet so that he could remain sturdy and autocratic forever. Fletcherism had to do with the baneful effects of swallowing actual pieces of food. It was ruled necessary to chew every mouthful, including the consomme, until the jaws went into a spasm of exhaustion and the mash slipped frictionlessly down the gullet. The digestive system was spared much effort by this procedure and health burgeoned across the land, along with hypertrophied jaw muscles. The Hay Diet, concerned mainly with segregating proteins from starches, was a worthy companion to Fletcherism. Deaths from steak-and-potato dinners had been rising at an alarming rate, and no votary of Dr. Hay was foolish enough to eat both meat and starch at the same meal. To see someone grimly Fletcherizing his baked-potato lunch was more fun than trying to get KDKA on the crystal set.

During the late Twenties and early Thirties it became known that one of the worst crimes of womanhood was the habit of throwing away the water in which spinach was cooked. In this water— as anyone could tell after a single sip put his teeth on edge — reposed many healthful minerals. A bowl of spinach water, warm or chilled, and a couple of slices of whole wheat or graham bread, from which none of the natural bran had been extracted by the dastardly flour interests, gave you enough energy to leave the table as quickly as you could.

The country's most popular entertainer during much of the Thirties was Rudy Vallee. The gentleman crooner, whose thin, nasal tenor appealed hugely to maternal types, was sponsored on coast-to-coast radio by Fleischmann's Yeast, and a regular feature of the weekly program was a brief but incisive health talk by one Dr. R. E. Lee. Dr. Lee's messages sent everybody's mother galloping to the store for the little yeast cakes which were supposed to be great for pimples, bowels and bloodstream. The stuff was hard to take. It tasted like a sweat sock. It stuck to the roof of the mouth. But if you downed enough of it the results were gratifying: (1) your mother seemed to feel better;(2) she stopped making you eat bran for breakfast. The yeast may have been a boon at that, because medical researchers later announced that bowls of bran, ingested at daily intervals, can have an abrasive effect on the viscera comparable to steel wool. Researchers also discovered, incidentally, that yeast has no great bearing on pimples and, while a source of Vitamin Bj, is not needed by normal people who eat normal food.

The bowels have long been a major area of concern to Americans. It is an article of faith in this country that clockwork regularity of elimination is the hallmark of mental and physical well-being. People who didn't care for yeast in the Thirties cleared themselves out with psyllium seeds, nasty little dried-up pit-like objects which were mixed with water — a tablespoon to a cup — and swallowed with all the pleasure that might accompany the ingestion of a bird-shot cocktail. The theory was that once in the alimentary canal, the seeds would swell and form a gelatinous mass which would inexorably push all bad things out before it.

Tens of millions of Americans, of course, still swallow lubricants and irritants to facilitate the intestinal rapid transit which the nation hails as Regularity — the slightest deviation from which, as everyone knows, signifies the accumulation of poisonous wastes and perpetual irritability. But a look back to other centuries indicates that today's laxatives, whether camouflaged in chocolate or chewing gum, aren't what they used to be. Consider, for example, this advertisement from the London Spectatorof 1711: "Famous Drops for Hypocondriack Melancholy: Which effectually cure on the Spot, by rectifying the Stomach and Blood, cleansing them from all Impurities, and giving a new Turn to their Ferment, attenuating all viscous and tenacious Humours (which make the Head Heavy, clog the Spirits, confuse the Mind, and cause the deepest Melancholy, with direful Views and black Reflections), comforting the Brain and Nerves, composing the harried Thoughts, and introducing bright, lively Ideas and pleasant Briskness, instead of dismall Apprehension and dark Incum-brance of the Soul, setting the Intellectuals at liberty to act with Courage, Serenity and steady Cheerfulness, and causing a visible, diffusive Joy to reign in the Room of uneasy Doubts, Fears, etc. . . ." Lemon juice and hot water (for a while in the Thirties, much valued as a pre-breakfast regulator) is pretty pale stuff next to that.

Nowadays, countless thousands of otherwise sane men and women, having presumably tried gelatin cocktails and found them wanting, believe that all that stands between them and debility is bread made from stone-ground flour made from wheat grown on land fertilized by compost manufactured by worms. They are convinced that the proprietors of industrial agriculture have developed miraculous means of growing nutrition-free crops of all kinds. Stanchly refusing to accept repeated scientific as-surances that mass-produced food, including artificially enriched white bread, is nourishing, they haunt the health-food stores. Some of them, in a modern version of the spinach-water fad, purchase electric liquefiers that grind up entire vegetables, fruits and eggs (not excepting the shells) into what they fondly regard as health cocktails. There is no harm in any of this, except to the sensibilities.

The most popular health foods today are, as the well-read all know, blackstrap molasses, wheat germ, brewers' yeast and that awesome secret of Bulgarian supremacy, yoghurt. Credited with the popularity of these marvelous substances is Gayelord Hauser, a seer who lacks medical credentials but is privy to truths unknown to physicians. Moreover, he rejoiced for years in a close friendship with Greta Garbo.

Blackstrap molasses, to be unpoetic about it, is the goo found in the vat after cane sugar has been refined. Its advocates say it is unusually rich in iron and copper; chemists point out that the iron is rust from the refining machinery and the copper is scrapings from the vat. The stuff provides not nearly so much Vitamin Bx as is claimed and, in short, is not preferable to other sweetenings.

Wheat germ is a nutritious part of the grain that is removed in commercial milling because it spoils easily., For all known practical purposes its nutrients are replaced by chemical enrichment.

Nutritionists are positive that persons who eat a normal diet need no extra wheat germ, although no harm can come from it. Brewers' yeast, like the baker's yeast which gagged the adolescents of three decades ago, is a source of Vitamin Bx — which, to repeat, normal people derive from a normal diet. Yoghurt has worked no health miracles in the Balkans and will work none here. Laboratory analysis discloses that this exotic product contains all the nutritive benefits of commercial buttermilk. Yoghurt, by the way, is likely to arouse in persons now approaching middle age queasy memories of acidophilus milk, which during its heyday a couple of decades ago, was widely touted as nature's way of "changing the intestinal flora." The theory was that most people were going around with intestines that resembled a vegetable patch overgrown with rank weeds. Getting rid of the old flora and planting the new was every American's duty both to his intestines and to national survival — and no small duty either, since it required considerable intestinal fortitude just to gulp down the slightly creamy, slightly sour potation.

The eagerness with which the diges-tively oriented rally to the support of any theory that promises super-health has seldom been demonstrated more dramatically than in the success of Dr. D. C. Jarvis, a nonconformist M.D., who believes in homely medications, like apple cider vinegar, honey and kelp. The elderly Vermont practitioner's book, Folk Medicine,reigned on the national best-seller lists for two years, and was joined there for a while by a sequel, Arthritis and Folk Medicine.Jarvis is a zealot for self-diagnosis and self-medication. He recommends that we test the acidity of our own urine, promote fertility by avoiding wheat, rely on castor oil in the treatment of warts, tired feet and hemorrhoids, drink an iodine solution to relieve fatigue and keep generally robust with honey.

Many of Dr. Jarvis' notions have a hallowed history. In particular, honey, which he believes is more healthful than sugar, has always held a powerful fascination for do-it-yourself health fans. Its status as a natural product, which gets from hive to mouth with a minimum of interfeience, seems to invest it with a magical purity not available to laboratory examination. Also, since bees are among the most diligent and virtuous of living creatures, one may hope to acquire some of their noble characteristics by eating the food from their hives. We're back to "You Are What You Eat."

The latest reasoning of this kind once again involves our heroine, the bee, and has a goodly part of our older citizenry delirious with hope. Under the benign tutelage of great healers and advertising men, hundreds of thousands of ladies are gulping capsules of or smearing their persons with emollients containing a mysterious substance known as royal jelly. As nearly as can be determined from the evidence, royal jelly enables an ordinary bee larva to become a queen bee, lead an adventurous sex life and lay four hundred thousand eggs a year. Logic therefore decrees that royal jelly enhances human virility, or firms the breasts, or improves the memory, or lengthens the life, or strengthens the eyes, as the case may be. Inasmuch as humans are not bees, they may count themselves fortunate that their systems select from this stupendous substance only the miracles that benefit man. There is as yet no record of any royal jelly customer sprouting wings, laying eggs or stinging anyone.

The first promoters of perfection to give attention to royal jelly, naturally, were the cosmetics manufacturers, who are famously alert in such matters. Each year our liberated women purchase a veritable Everest of corrective creams containing not only royal jelly but inspirational hormones extracted from the urine of pregnant mares, oils yielded by romantic reptiles, metals as beautiful as gold, vegetables as heartening as Irish parsley and lily pod, and even a substance made from placenta, than which nothing is more closely associated with extreme youthfulness. Girls desirous of bosoms larger than nature has seen fit to grant them, for example, often become avid customers for developing creams sold through the mail. The menthol contained in the unguents imparts an almost immediate sense of undulation to the user. Manufacturers' files bulge with unsolicited testimonials from grateful, pneumatic girls who started using the products at age eleven, and, sure enough, began seeing results in a year or two.

Similar magic, in reverse, is available for combating that crudest saboteur of female beauty, superfluous flesh. Some brands of reducing pill contain poisonous appetite-depressants in amounts too small to depress most appetites but small enough to minimize the danger of poisoning. Other popular reducing aids taste like candy — which is appropriate since that's what they are. Women who can be convinced that a piece of candy before each meal means death to ravenous hunger may lose a few pounds because they eat less — which is what they should have done in the first place. The reducing trade has recently been revolutionized by the introduction of products which claim to provide takers with nine hundred nutritionally bal-anced calories a day — a fairly drastic diet. Metrecal and its several dozen competitors are now grossing upwards of one hundred million dollars a year by the simple expedient of destroying their customers' appetites. Anyone who has consumed a glass of the stuff can for the next couple of hours face food only with the greatest difficulty. It's as though she had tossed off a beaker of raw egg white, rendered opaque by chocolate. She wants to be excused from the table. In due course she gets thin.

The instinctive wisdom of both sexes when it comes to romance reaches its zenith in coping with the problems presented by teeth and breath. All humans are aware by now that they emit unendurable fumes unless they drench their mouths with certain liquids that are instantly fatal to the decay germs that roam the gums like herds of evil-smelling buffalo. Oceans of mouthwash are bought on the canny assumption that a tingle is tantamount to sanitation. Toothpastes containing chlorophyll and green-tinted pills compounded of it are much sought, since this is the natural vegetable substance that accounts for the pleasing fragrance of, among other herbiverous creatures, goats.

While chlorophyll is miraculously deodorizing people's systems, various drugs are miraculously curing them of all sorts of illnesses. At the first sign of nasal or pharyngeal inflammation, for example, they eagerly gulp down a pill that combines antihistamines (sometimes good for allergic reactions), with aspirin (good for pain), with citrus bioflavonoids (terrific for the imagination), with heartfelt promises (a therapeutic must) — thereby assuring themselves of complete recovery, often within a week or two.

Of course, it is only the benighted masses who cram themselves with health foods and self-prescribed medications and then resort to "regulators" to get the stuff out of their systems as fast as possible. Our enlightened contemporaries know better than to subject their insides to such tinkering and tampering. When they go to the drugstore, they buy not a laxative but a tran-quilizer to banish that waking-up depression, a pep pill to give them energy for the morning's work, a barbiturate to calm the innards so that lunch may be something better than agony, another pep pill to dispel midafternoon groggi-ness and carry them through to the cocktail hour, and a sleeping pill to stave off the pep pill's legacy of insomnia. To be sure, there was a time not too long ago when individual idiosyncrasy and the tolerance developed by continual use weakened the efficacy of this beneficent regimen for some. However, the invention of spansules— those delayed-reaction medicinal depth charges that explode within the corpus like a series of time bombs — has taken care of that problem. Could anyone ask for more?