The Road to Wellville (50 page)

“Well, now, aside from the shocking and deplorable conditions in the abattoirs of this country, which I believe I addressed from this podium two weeks ago—was it two or three weeks, Frank?” The Doctor paused, a look of benign consternation on his face, to put the question to Frank Linniman, who sat erect, with his legs neatly crossed, in the front row.

“Two weeks, Doctor,” came the reply.

“Yes. Well. For those of you who weren’t with us then, let me say that you might consult
The Jungle
, Mr. Upton Sinclair’s excellent novel on the subject—and he was our guest here just this past fall, incidentally; a great privilege to have had him—and, of course, my own book on this issue,
Shall We Slay to Eat?
, published and disseminated by our presses here the year previous to Mr. Sinclair’s laudable volume, and
which is, by the way, available to you all, and at a very small cost, the whole of which helps to sustain this institution and its vital work….

“Be that as it may, I needn’t tonight regale you—or should I say horrify you—with tales of animal waste, feces, blood, urine and even vomit being pressed into sausage casings or tins of potted meat, or the practice of grinding up the flesh of tubercular animals—infectious tubercles and all, I might add, a sort of flavoring, as it were—to disguise the foul quality of the meat…. I can see at a glance the depth of revulsion you feel at the mere mention of these facts, which are a matter of record, and what civilized person wouldn’t recoil from such a horror? Just try to imagine for a moment, won’t you, the helpless terror-struck cries of the calves, lambs, piglets, chickens, ducklings and turkeys led to slaughter, the blood of their cousins, their sisters, brothers, the blood of their own progenitors reeking in their nostrils….”

He held up his hands in a gesture of disavowal. “But it is not my intention tonight to enumerate these blasphemies against life and health, blasphemies that continue even as we sit here, that continue despite the efforts of Mr. Sinclair and Dr. Wiley and the Federal Food and Drug Administration and all of us who seek to pursue a sanitary, progressive, pure, kind and enlightened life—no, it is my intention to answer Mr. W.B.J.’s question, to tell you, in all its stomach-turning detail, of an evil far more insidious even.” He let his eyes roam over the faces ranged round him, wave upon wave of them, running all the way back to the big oaken doors at the rear of the room and beyond—there must have been twenty or thirty people crowded into the hallway itself. “Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to tell you something of the parasites—the worms, if you will—that seethe in every morsel of flesh you might consciously or unconsciously have lifted to your lips over the course of a lifetime—prior, that is, to your conversion to biologic living.”

It was a moment of delight for the diminutive Doctor, the moment he lived for, the moment when he had his audience right where he wanted them. There wasn’t a murmur, a yawn, a sigh: his hold on them was absolute. “All right,” he said, “let’s take the trichina worm to begin
with.
Trichinella spiralis
, to be precise. This scourge of man and animal alike—it’s recently been discovered in animals as various as the American black bear and the African hippopotamus—owes its foul existence entirely to carnivorous practices, most particularly, among humans, to the consumption of the flesh of the pig. It is little wonder that the ancients of the Levant, Hebrew and Arab alike, banished this filthy beast from their tables…. Would that they had banished mutton and beef as well,” he added with a wistful sigh.

“At any rate, pork which has been improperly dressed and inadequately cooked, when ingested, will free the trichina larvae from their capsules, or cysts, cysts in which they dwell for an indeterminate period—years, in many cases—in the muscular flesh of their host. Once that flesh is consumed, the larvae free themselves of their capsules and breed within the digestive system, each worm producing as many as a thousand offspring. The young worms bore through the intestinal walls and are carried in the blood to their final destination, the body’s muscular fibers. And there they will lodge, encrusted in the rock-hard cysts they fabricate, until they are in turn eaten. Which in the case of the human being is unlikely, unless one finds oneself at the mercy of a tribe of South Sea cannibals. No: these cysts are permanent. There is no cure.”

He paused, waited. What one of them wasn’t recalling that distant strip of bacon, the chop, the loin? Half a dozen of the women actually squirmed in their seats.

“I cannot tell you,” he went on, his voice somber now, “how much agony I’ve witnessed as a result of these parasites, all but powerless to help despite the physiologic tools the Almighty has put into my hands. Oh, the grinding shoulders and clacking knees, the infested respiratory muscles, riddled hearts! I had a patient once who came to me after years of heedless abuse—he was an Iowa farmer who had butchered a hog each and every autumn of his life. Well, this poor distressed individual couldn’t lift his arms to shoulder level, so riddled was he with trichina cysts. It was heartbreaking. He would try to raise his arms, wincing against the terrible knifing pain….” The Doctor broke off, overcome. His eyes clouded and he struggled with his voice. “I tell you truly, the sound of those cysts grating against bone and sinew alike will never
leave me. Friends, it was like the sound of cracking walnuts. Just to lift his arms. Cracking walnuts. Can you for one minute appreciate the pain that must have racked that suffering frame?”

Silence, suitably appalled.

“Mercifully, my friends, he didn’t have long to suffer—he was dead at the age of forty, the heart muscle itself invaded by these treacherous parasites, these worms,
worms
, ladies and gentlemen.” He shook his head sadly. “And all because he had a taste for pork.”

The Doctor went on to illustrate his point with a gimmick similar to the one he’d employed in the instance of Mrs. Tindermarsh’s beefsteak. From an icebox located strategically behind him on the platform, he produced a pork shoulder from Tuckerman’s Meat Market (“Guaranteed fresh today,” he announced breezily), still wrapped in Tuckerman’s crisp white paper and fastened with Tuckerman’s twine. He instructed Frank Linniman to take three thin-cut samples of the meat and arrange them on slides under the microscopes lined up on the table at the rear of the platform. He then called for three volunteers from the audience to examine the slides, looking for the telltale coils in the striations of the muscular tissue.

John Hampton Krinck, the reprobate, backslider and nihilist, waved his hands energetically, but the Doctor ignored him. What the occasion demanded was a little feminine pulchritude, the well-turned ankle and athletic bosom. And here he missed Ida Muntz, and felt, for just a hairs-breadth of a second, a stab of uncertainty—he’d never have admitted her if he’d suspected just how severe her condition was. Greensickness. It was nothing. And yet she’d been one of his most pronounced failures, the very worst sort of advertisement. At the funeral, her parents—odious people, for all their money—had almost seemed to blame him, as if he hadn’t done all he could to undo the years of carnivorous abuse they’d heaped upon her. And yet still he wondered: Had he given her too much of the radium? Not enough? Was the element all it was cracked up to be?

But there was no use in crying over spilt milk, and so he shrugged it off and chose Eleanor Lightbody—stunning woman, beautiful, really, but too thin: had she been starving herself?—and a young lady from Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, who had to supply him with her name—an
annoyance: and what was it with names lately; was his mind going now?—and Vivian DeLorbe, the actress from Broadway. All three found the unmistakable evidence, the evil little worms coiled like snails in their shells, just waiting to spring forth and invade the unsuspecting body. Miss DeLorbe even emitted a number of very satisfactory and highly theatrical expressions of disgust.

It was a charming performance, but nothing compared to what came next. Once the stage had been cleared and the audience had had a moment to reflect on the quality of the meat served up by Battle Creek’s finest butcher and how that reflected on the quality of the meat served up elsewhere, the Doctor returned to the question of the pseudonymous W.B.J. and spoke at length of the tapeworm. He gave special attention to his description of the adult form and the hooks by which it attaches its scolex to the walls of the human intestine, and when he had sufficiently impressed his point on the audience, he asked Frank Linniman to circulate among them while cradling a jar in which a twenty-foot specimen had been preserved.

“I remember the patient well,” the Doctor began, reminiscing as the tapeworm made its rounds in Dr. Linniman’s capable hands. “He was a man of means, an attorney who’d risen to the top of his profession as a founding partner of one of New York’s great law firms—there are few in this room, I’m sure, who will not have heard of it. I was an intern at Bellevue at the time, and the man expired suddenly and without warning, of complications arising from acute autointoxication—he was, from all accounts, a great frequenter of tavern and chophouse. During the autopsy, which I had the dubious honor of supervising, this little specimen turned up, perfectly preserved and still very much alive.” There wasn’t a face in the room, not even Krinck’s, that hadn’t gone white. “I just thought I’d share that little story with you,” the Doctor went on, “in the event that any of you might be tempted at some point in your life to return to the carnivorous diet. Wiener, anyone? How about a nice rare pork chop?”

There was a flurry of questions, all delivered in hushed bloodless tones, concerning various preparations and types of meat—“Venison?” the Doctor cried at one point, “why, you might just as well swallow the tapeworm eggs themselves and have done with it!”—and an exhaustive
comparison of individual symptoms to the effects of the organism at hand. At least a dozen questions began with the hypothetical “What if—?”

Dr. Kellogg was patient with them. After all, by exposing the shortcomings of Tuckerman’s select pork and showing them that hideous, faceless, hook-headed flatworm in the jar, he’d succeeded in his purpose—that is, to arouse and disgust them and harden their resolution to avoid meat and meat products forever. After half an hour or so, he took a few unrelated questions on heliotherapy,
Naturkultur
and nudism (he approved of it all, even nudism, so long as the sexes were rigidly segregated) and the physiological causes of yawning and the power of suggestion. Then, just when they were worn down emotionally, sapped, exhausted, fighting to maintain the proper physiologic posture in their orthopedic chairs, the Doctor brought on his showstopper.

The yawning question had given rise to an epidemic of that oral phenomenon, and Dr. Kellogg was just winding up his comments—“Bathing the face with cold water, drinking a glass of hot or cold water or some refreshing beverage will generally cause the disposition to yawn to disappear”—when Dr. Linniman, having disburdened himself of the pickled tapeworm, strolled casually into the room with Fauna, the timber wolf, on a leash.

The crowd immediately came to life. Fauna wasn’t perhaps the crowd pleaser that Lillian the chimp was, but her appearance signaled one of the Doctor’s stunts. Heads turned. The yawning ceased. A whisper of voices buzzed up and down the aisles. Dr. Kellogg beamed as Frank, with his fair hair and physiologic jaw, made his way up the aisle, the wolf padding docilely at his side. To the Doctor’s keen eye, the animal’s faults stood out in sharp relief—the uneven stride, the dysplastic hips, the dullness of the eyes and the discolored swath of hair along the underbelly where Murphy had neglected to powder her. The question of her diet had been the very devil from the beginning—the Doctor gave her peanuts and vegetable milk, Protose, cornmeal and wheat gluten, and he saw that her bowel was kept rigorously clean, but there was something lacking. On close inspection, the animal just didn’t look healthy. Still—and he released a small grunt of satisfaction—no one would notice. No: all they saw was a magnificent creature, a big white
vegetarian wolf, rescued from the wild as a pup and fed up to adulthood on Sanitarium fare.

Frank brought her up to the platform and handed her leash to the Doctor. The wolf, who knew her part as well as Lillian knew hers and was a whole lot more tractable to boot, gazed out calmly on the audience, as pure and rugged a symbol of nature as anything Jack London had to offer. She licked the Doctor’s hand and then settled down on her haunches, as comfortable as a retriever sitting before the fire. The Doctor waited until Frank Linniman had descended from the stage and left the room, and then he began his commentary in an easy off-the-cuff manner.

“You all know Fauna,” he said, laying a hand on the broad white head. “You’ve all seen her at play on the Sanitarium lawns, watched as she gamboled and cavorted with our deer and the conies we released at Easter. But one thing you’ve never seen is this animal’s wolfish nature. For you forget, ladies and gentlemen, that Fauna is no lapdog, no collie or shepherd, but a wolf, of that ravening breed that has been a bane to humankind from time immemorial, a real live wild wolf recovered from the wastes of the Northwest, at the very remotest tip of Lake Superior. But would she harm a hair of my head? Of yours? Would she dream of falling on those placid and innocent does and rabbits?” He patted her, and again she licked his hand (he made a mental note to wash up the minute he left the podium). “No, my friends and fellow seekers after the biologic ideal, of course she wouldn’t. And you all know the reason why—because she has never experienced nature red in tooth and claw, never killed, never once tasted meat. She was as yet unweaned when she was brought to us, and she has been fed exclusively on the foods that you and I customarily consume, a champion and exemplar of the vegetarian diet.”

At that moment, the crowd at the entranceway parted and again Dr. Linniman entered the room. This time he was accompanied by a pair of husky attendants bearing a cage, from the depths of which issued a steady savage warning growl, a rumbling antiphon of rage and hate broken only by the odd snarling insuck of breath. There was danger in the room. The audience felt it, and it poked at their spines, got the ancestral juices flowing, elevated the short hairs at the napes of their necks. Fauna felt it, too. Her ears went erect and she let out a barely
audible whimper, but the Doctor silenced her with a surreptitious kick.