Fletcherism: What It Is; Or, How I Became Young at SixtyFletcher, Horace
Science
Fletcherism: What It Is; Or, How I Became Young at Sixty
Fletcher, Horace
Mastication; Nutrition
The standard dish, however, of the Javan dinner is boiled potatoes
and beefsteak swimming in a pint of good butter gravy, so that even
the conscientious dietist with vegetarian preferences may revel in
something that smacks of home and mother, with such an abundance of
luscious fruits that nothing but gustatory delight happens as a usual
thing. Still, it is the same in Java or Japan, in London, Paris,
Berlin, Vienna, Rome or New York, the digestion of food is under the
control of the head and therefore may be called head digestion.
PROFESSOR FISHER'S EXPERIMENT
The most important large experiment for the testing of head digestion
under conditions of strict scientific control was that inaugurated and
conducted by Professor Irving Fisher, of Yale University, in America.
Professor Fisher occupies the Chair of Political Economy at Yale, has
made extensive researches into the factors that influence the economies
or extravagances of living, and is President of the Committee of One
Hundred of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on
Health.
Professor Fisher's interest in my revelations and tests relative to
the potency of head digestion came primarily from a personal test
which worked wonders for him in establishing a foundation for good
health. He was not satisfied with the later Chittenden experiments,
because they substituted academic prescription for natural selection in
formulating the rules of the inquiry. Like myself, in conducting the
original researches, Professor Fisher realised that the practical value
of my discoveries was that no one needed a biological chemist to order
his meals for him or tell his appetite what his body needed in the way
of food elements.
[Illustration: HORACE FLETCHER IN HIS MASTER OF ARTS ROBES.]
The Fisher experiment worked with nine healthy undergraduates who were
ambitious to take high scholastic honours, and who had little time for
athletics or any form of physical exercise, they being types of the
average University undergraduate.
A generous table was supplied them with meat and every variety of food
that usually composed college fare. The only instructions were that
thorough mastication and especial attention to the enjoyment of the
food as recommended by me in my books should be faithfully performed.
This course was pursued for half a year, and for the rest of the year,
in addition to the careful head treatment and enjoyment, preference
was to be given to foods known to be low in nitrogen content; but not
to the extent of suppressing any distinct call of appetite for them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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