Medicine: Wiley

Feast. A fortnight ago, in Manhattan, Harvey W. Wiley, coeur-de-lion of pure-food crusades, onetime chief U. S. Government Chemist, sat down to dinner. The occasion was his 80th birthday; his hosts were the members of the Agricultural Chemists’ Association, of which he is the Honorary President. Down the long table, fenced with formal shirtfronts, candles shone on the sparkling glasses, on the dishes and dishes of food that succeeded one another. Savory food it was, nourishing, succulent; but on the little cards beside each place it was called by strange names—Borax, Benzoate, Coal Tar, Copper Sulfate, Saltpeter, Saccharin. Thus were those dishes named, each after a poison, out of sentiment. For, had it not been for Dr. Wiley, the names might have become the dishes, though they would have been called Bread, Jam, Sugar, Chocolate, out of sentiment. Each of the items on the menu of that feast was the name of an enemy Dr. Wiley had laid low many years ago in his crusade for pure foods and drugs. It was a long campaign.

For Purity. He conceived the pure food idea when he, a Professor at Purdue University, had taken a year off to study Chemistry in Berlin. Returning, he analyzed some table syrups for the Indiana Board of Health, found them “abominably adulterated.” Made Chief Chemist to the U. S. Government, he began his famed food experiments on human beings. In his Bureau, he formed a “poison squad” of volunteers—12 gallant youths from the clerical force who swore to eat nothing beyond the curious diet he daily administered to them. He fed them on advertised foods that contained boracic acid, sulfates, benzoates, formaldehyde; he watched their cheeks grow lean, their temples hollow, their skins turn the color of whey. He watched the falling off of their flesh, the softening of their bones; and he tabulated the results. His principle postulated two theories—1) that food should not be in itself poisonous, 2) that it should be mixed with nothing that was not demonstrably helpful. “I do not object,” said he, “to the use of cottonseed and sunflower oils as salad dressings by those who have a taste for them, but I resent paying 40c a bottle for these fats merely because they have been labeled olive oil. My battle is for the privilege of going free of robbery with a guarantee of health.”

“Old Borax.” The patent-medicine makers, the rich-food-makers, the formaldehyde-and-seekers, the sulfiters, the coal tartars rose up against him, dubbed him “Old Borax.” On June 30, 1906, the Pure Food and Drugs Act was signed: but Dr. Wiley’s battle with the food concerns still went on. So fiercely did it rage that Roosevelt appointed a Board of Referees, headed by one Dr. Remsen, to adjust difficulties. Dr. Remsen was the inventor of saccharin, a sub stance which Dr. Wiley declared to be unfit for human consumption. This Board had power to overrule Wiley’s judgments. The interests leagued against Wiley, finally manufactured charges that he had misused the funds of his Bureau; and, though exonerated by President Taft after a careful investigation had been made, he resigned in protest. Thereafter, he carried on his fight in the pages of Good Housekeeping, a publication which furnished him with a laboratory and a sympathetic public. He examined, wrote about a thousand foods. Now his condemnation damns the sales of any comestible as if it were visibly putrified; his praise is an advertisement beyond price.

Principles and Practice. He once wrote a treatise entitled Principles and Practice of Agricultural Chemistry. As an illustration of scrupulous coincidence between the two, his own life serves excellently. At 80, he gives an impression of enormous strength. He moves his six-foot frame around his laboratory with much caution as if knowing it too bull-like for that scientific china-shop; handles fragile test-tubes with deft enormous fingers, bending his ruddy countenance to watch some minute reaction. When, at Purdue University, he was reprimanded for playing baseball with the undergraduates and riding a bicycle, he resigned. Losing his hair at 60, he prophesied that in a few years the whole human race would be hairless; but chancing to go bareheaded for a while, he raised another crop, retracted his prophecy. He married at 66, has two sons aged ten and twelve. He states that he will live to be 100. In addition to Principles and Practice, he is the author of 1001 Tests of Food Beverages and Toilet Articles, many Government bulletins andmiscellaneous monographs. “It has been my fortune,” said he, “to be in the thick of the fight.”