The Wondrous World of Physical Culture!

As I've researched exercise and nutrition for myself I've gravitated toward the history of both and encountered the endlessly amusing and sometimes damned educational subject, "Physical Culture."

"A striking example of muscular power"

"Physical Culture" was how writers and star athletes who had books ghostwritten for them referred to fitness and nutrition. The cultivation, as it were, of the body. The term had its strongest vogue between 1890 and 1910 or so, based on the wealth of published books with that phrase in the title from that period.

I'll explore how and what people used to write about Physical Culture in other posts. To give a sense of what it was like to try and learn about diet and exercise from books 100 years ago I've embedded a magazine published in 1899 by Bernarr Adolphus MacFadden titled Physical Culture. It's a hell of a document--the first page I opened while looking at it on Archive.org contained the illustration at the top of the post, which you really have to click on to get the full effect. Here's a choice chunk of prose from the page facing the illustration:

AWAKE NOW! Do not be satisfied with the average doped mind and weakened body that we find everywhere at the present time. Insist on getting all there is out of life. DON'T BE A TOBACCO-DOPE, a WHISKEY-SOAK or a BEER-GUZZLER.

Bernarr (and the other writers published in this volume) was clearly a real treat. To read more inveighing against the WHISKEY-SOAKS and BEER-GUZZLERS, look below, TOBACCO-DOPE.

No, but this is fun. All these people are dead now, so ultimately, what did they know, right?