Perfect Health Based on Science and Experience. If you are tired of being sick half the time, or half sick all the time, Read this book.
Toledo, OH: W.F. Ries, [1922]. First edition. Over fifty half- and full-page illustrations, including many photo reproductions of the author exercising, graphs and charts, and diagrams of children’s development. A few ink smudges to cloth. Some dustsoiling to edges. A very good copy of a scarce book. Publisher’s light brown cloth titled in black. Octavo. 165, [4] pp. Item #17746
This guidebook by health guru William Frederich Ries (1855 – 1944) includes menus, exercise suggestions (including about a dozen photographs of Ries stretching on a sort of makeshift sawhorse, dubbed the “Health Horse”), and the author’s opinions on children’s health (“more than half the school children are defective”). The menus offer plans for weight loss, weight gain, “For Business Men,” and “For a Normal Person Who Insists on Three Meals a Day,” though Ries strongly discourages eating breakfast. He argues that breakfast is harmful not just to a person’s health but to the moral fabric of society: “At the height of their national glory the Persians ate but one meal a day,” he writes. “After the Persians reverted to several meals per day they went crazy and committed national suicide,” (p. 32). Ries also includes several pages of quippy “Helthograms,” including ominous warnings like “If you can’t kick higher than your head you are on the way to the undertaker” (p. 61). We could not locate that much more information about Ries. He was a dedicated Socialist and a prolific writer of leftist publications, including Monkeys and Monkeyettes: A Reply to ex-President Roosevelt (1909), Lions and Lambs: or, Co-Operative Farming (1910), and Hi-cost of Living: Cost and Cure, a Peaceful Solution (1920). He also wrote the lecture “How We Are Gouged” for the Socialist Lyceum, a 1911-1912 lecture series hosted by the Socialist Party.
OCLC records only three copies of this edition: Belmont Abbey College (NC), the Henry Ford Library (MI), and Vanderbilt University.
Price: $350.00