Sylvester Graham, 1794–1851
Sylvester Graham was an outspoken advocate of proper health, hygiene, diet, and sexual reform in
nineteenth-century America. Although he had no medical training, Graham was convinced of the need for
vegetarianism, unbolted flour, moderate exercise, loose clothing, cold baths, and strict temperance. He lectured
to large audiences in the 1830s, wrote several books on chastity and nutrition, including his influential Lectures
on the Science of Human Life (1839), and promoted rigorous discipline in the avoidance of stimulants of all
sorts. His followers—called Grahamites—shared in his almost religious zeal for physical and moral purity, and
even today the Graham cracker still bears his name.
Selected passages from Sylvester Graham's 1834 "Lecture to Young Men":
The wisest and best men, of every age, have manifested a deep interest in the welfare of youth; and have considered their intellectual, moral, and physical education, character and condition, of the utmost importance to the individual, social, and civil welfare of mankind.
[...]
In every condition of the human race, the physical, as well as the moral, state of the people, is of the highest consideration; but more especially in a country like ours, where the aggregate of individual character and individual will, constitutes the foundation and efficiency of all our civil and political institutions.
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Those LASCIVIOUS DAY-DREAMS, and amorous reveries, in which young people too generally,--and especially the idle, and the voluptuous, and the sedentary, and the nervous,--are exceedingly apt to indulge, are often the sources of general debility, effeminacy, disordered functions, and permanent disease, and even premature
death, without the actual exercise of the genital organs! Indeed! this unchastity of thought--this adultery of the mind, is the beginning of immeasurable evil to the human family.
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Beyond all question, an immeasurable amount of evil results to the human family, from sexual excess within the precincts of wedlock. Languor, lassitude, muscular relaxation, general debility and heaviness, depression of spirits, loss of appetite, indigestion, faintness and sinking at the pit of the stomach, increased susceptibilities of the skin and lungs to all the atmospheric changes, feebleness of circulation, chilliness, head-ache, melancholy, hypochondria, hysterics, feebleness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weakness of the lungs, nervous cough, pulmonary consumption, disorders of the liver and kidneys, urinary difficulties, disorders of the genital organs, weakness of the brain, loss of memory, epilepsy, insanity, apoplexy,--and extreme feebleness and early death of offspring,--are among the too common evils which are caused by sexual excesses between husband and wife.
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The mental and moral faculties of the brain, are fully involved in the general and special injuries; and the mental powers and manifestations, are proportionally impaired. The mind becomes exceedingly carnal, and inclined to dwell on sensual subjects, and cherish sensual images; and by degrees, becomes more and more averse to special application and continued effort. All systematic discipline and education become extremely irksome to it. Its energies and elasticity gradually decline; and by imperceptible degrees, it becomes weak and fickle