May 28, 2025 [updated April 12, 2025]
There will be more to come on this topic, but for now, sit with this, an ad from the April 1901 edition of Physical Culture, published by Bernarr MacFadden.
MacFadden was an early proponent of exercise, natural foods, and fitness. He was also a sex addict and a medical crank, convinced, for example, he could live to 150 if he walked barefoot to his Manhattan office, thereby absorbing the earth’s magnetic forces.
If this all sounds familiar, it is because, in the age of Trump, the cranks are back. Only this time, they’re in charge.
As Jessica Grose writes in a recently published guest essay in the New York Times:
It is impossible to read about Mr. Macfadden — who was using the term “medical freedom” in 1920 — without thinking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our new secretary of health and human services, and the raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-skeptical, psychedelic-loving Make America Healthy Again movement that has coalesced around him.
[MORE TO COME]