Welcome to Saturday / Allopathic machines

I will write here on Saturdays and I will write about eccentric trends, movements and people.  Less often I will describe odd professions from by-gone eras and offer challenges based on the skills required to perform these jobs.  Even less frequently holidays will declared to commemorate lesser known 

persons or events that are worthy of celebration.  

In the wee hours of the morning, television stops airing programs interupted by commercials 

and just airs commercials.  It is at this time that people give up on 

conscious thought.  The employed resign themselves to sleep and those less encumbered by success partake of other methods.  On our TV's, whether we notice or not, the infomercials 

queue up.  Frenetic salesmen step into view for a half-hour at a time to present your problems and then merciully offer a sollution until the sun again 

rises and the world resumes the parts of our lives suitable for print. 

                   I own the night.

It is to these dark hours that we have relegated the salesmen of exercise machines, though our mania for a half-assed fitness stays with us throughout the day.  It would seem our modern lives, uniquely sedentary and uniquely full of unhealthy food, created the need for exercise equipment but this is not so.  A century ago well-to-do men and their wives worried about 

their well-being and an eccentric group of hucksters came to invent bizarre and fantastic fitness machines.  

                                                             Feel the burn!!

 In an age before anti-biotics, doctors typically ordered various allopathic treatments such as rest.  The wealthy spent time at a variety of sanatoriums where they could rest and enjoy the

 first health foods created.  Of course, rest improves the immune system so there was some sense in this, at least more sense than draining copious amounts of blood.  Progress marches on! This is the time in which W.K. Kellogg commercialized the diet of Seventh Day Adventists into popular cereals.  The Adventist blending of spirituality, health, pseudoscience and various grains into a health food typified the approach to well-being in this era. 

Not to be outdone, Europeans like Gustav Zander began harnessing the power of pulley wheels, fly-belts and other high technology into the service of health.  Zander's machines (one of which is pictured above) are interesting in how similar they are to our modern machines but even more interesting is how they are not.  The machines required their users to do very little.  Mark Twain's  observation that the machines offered "vigorous exercise, and others do it for you" seems to explain their popularity.  

The ideal of fitness was different then, too.  Plenty of lower-class working men could perform physically demanding tasks for long periods of time and so a more respectable notion of being fit was required.  While physical labor requires an actual expenditure of energy, doctors of the time imagined that the body's energy could only be released through more controlled and regulated forces.  This thinking was common.  Kellogg and other sanatarium proprietors offered masssages for this purpose and the machines Zander invented claimed to perfect the art by making it into a science.  Well, a psuedoscience but hey a doctor's gotta get paid somehow.  The various belts and disks that rubbed patiets were designed to raise latent energies from patients.  Presumably the patients then used these energies to sit around and um, be rich I guess.  The carefully controlled, precise belts or wheels offered an unparallleled opportunity to increase the body's overall health.    

Many of Zander's machines that involved pulleys and required actual exertion to use are sold today.  We think of exercise differently than previous generations and certainly exercise machines have been refined to be more useful, but the motivations behind their use have remained more or less the same.  Our fear of a sedentary lifestyle and pursuit of well-being through a variety of machines, pills and powders is quite a bit older than many would suspect.