1. Sylvester Graham

In the winter of 1825, a mysterious young man shows up in the seaside village of Little Compton, Rhode Island. Pale and thin, wearing an air of haggard sorrow, he cuts an ungainly figure, roaming the streets in an ill-fitting overcoat. The townspeople gawk and whisper. Slowly details leak out. His name is Sylvester Graham. He is employed as an agent by the Rhode Island Committee for the Suppression of Ardent Spirits. He has come to this cold coast to recuperate. In Amherst, Massachusetts, where he was studying to be a minister, he fell into trouble of some nature; it’s rumored he was forced to flee. The citizens of Little Compton marvel at this tall, spidery figure, traipsing through the slush and snow of their village, but little do they realize that Sylvester Graham is in the throes of spiritual agony, that he is confronting the great moral quandary of his young life: whether the unsettled strands of his being will sever and be plunged into darkness, or whether they will fuse into some valiant and directed purpose.

He cannot say. The future is uncertain. A typical evening, after the day’s labors are over, finds him reading by candlelight in the dim parlor of his boardinghouse: dietary treatises by Friedrich Accum, anatomical writings by Xavier Bichat, or, if he’s feeling restless, a novel by Walter Scott. Next, he eats a meagre supper of soup and boiled vegetables prepared by his landlady, politely rejects the pies and cakes she offers him (he has not yet devised the dietary systems that will one day make him famous, but even now the ideas are percolating, the seeds are germinating), and retires to his bedroom. And it’s here, lying on his cot, wrapped in a tattered quilt, the spirit lamp flickering in the gloom, that he can feel the ghosts of his past, the old familiar forms, pressing in upon him, clutching at him with their spectral fingers. In the light of day, he can keep the memories at bay, but at night they well up unbidden, overpowering his defenses and fixing him in a paroxysm of terror: what hounds him, as always, is the tragedy of his wasted youth. What might he have accomplished, by now, had he been born to more forgiving circumstances? At Amherst Academy, amongst the sons of eminent New England families, in their frock coats and tall silk hats, he had stood out like a cloven hoof. With searing clarity, he can recall the treachery of his peers: the gossip, the lies. How they had driven him to expulsion, how he had lasted less than a year. The rumors they circulated through town: that he was reared by savages, that he had behaved in an ungentlemanly fashion with Eugenia Miller, the baker’s daughter. All false. His classmates were jealous, he reassures himself, resentful of his oratorical gifts, his lordly powers of elocution. A burden, to be possessed of an inner genius, that somehow, through the devil’s work, appears as a strangeness to others.

And yet at times, alone in his bedroom at night, he fixates on these same classmates and imagines exchanging his upbringing with theirs, imagines being reared in a house that is noble and quiet and still, a house with polished mantlepieces and thick carpets and framed portraits of venerable ancestors lining the walls, a house with books, with a fireplace in every room, where there is no yelling, where nothing is ugly, where noise is controlled, where it is regulated and parceled out in beautiful forms, in lullabies, music boxes, tinkling pianos. The intensity of his desire for this phantom house is so powerful that he feels as if he’s summoning it into plain existence, that a door is opening in the air above his bed and that to enter it he must merely put one foot in front of the other and cross the threshold. But then, with the suddenness of a thunderclap, the shamefulness of his childhood rears up and the vision collapses. Son to a lunatic mother and a decrepit father (an ancient figure, bent and white-haired, feeding chickens in the snow: his only memory), shunted as a child from one wretched relative to the next, put to work in menial occupations, at nine he’s a farmhand, at eleven a laborer in a paper mill, at thirteen shipped off to work in the tavern of his troglodytic uncle, where he serves tankards of porter and rotgut applejack to broken men whose minds are made of gruel. Constantly, there is the specter of this other life he might have led, this life in which, instead of mopping up spilt beer and vomit in the stinking dawn to avoid a beating from his uncle, he’s learning Latin and Greek, training his mind to higher spheres.

He finds solace in the sea. At midday, breaking from his labors, he takes solitary walks along the pier. The cries of the gulls, the billowing sails of ships, the immense expanse of blue water, flecked by white bursts of foam, stretching out to meet a slate-colored sky: they are balms upon his afflicted soul. A crack opens in the darkness. Through it floats a rich ray of sunlight. He begins courting a sea captain’s daughter. Her name is Sara Earle. In Little Compton, Rhode Island, in the spring of 1825, he brings her wildflowers, clusters of bright cherry blossoms, and they spend pleasant afternoons conversing on the wide berth of her father’s porch while the salt air blows in from the sea. They share cherished Bible passages. They sing hymns. It is to Sara Earle that Sylvester Graham first expounds his theories on the restorative powers of unleavened wheat flour: its suitability to the alimentary organs, its universality and ancient pedigree. During their meetings on the porch, as Sara Earle follows the energetic peregrinations of Sylvester Graham’s mind, flitting from subject to subject like a butterfly traversing a wide and unruly meadow – now lamenting the contaminating effects of improper tillage on the quality of wheat, now abjuring the depravity of a nation obsessed with eating the carcasses of dead animals – she finds herself secretly thrilled by the tremulous modulations of his voice, that wondrous voice, so mellifluous and rich, whose tonal shifts remind her of a bird in flight, dropping low to build suspense, soaring high to punctuate a point. What fascinates her is the meaning, yes, but also the music of his talk, so that at certain moments the words almost cease to mean anything at all, and she is carried along on a river of pure sound, now low, now high, and she not only listens, she looks as well – his cherubic face, the ringlets of brown hair that frame his forehead, the merry sparkle of his eyes – and she’s startled to discover a quickening in her breast, a flush coming to her cheek.

But no, Sylvester says. They must beware the animal spirits. (In 1838 he will publish A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, in which he addresses the delicate topic of venereal indulgence, a topic which, he tells his 1838 audience, he has been reluctant to take up owing to its sensitivity, but which he now feels compelled to pursue, having received frequent appeals – heart-rending appeals, he emphasizes– from young men who are suffering on the rack of debilitating sexual desire, which, if left unchecked, he fears, will result in despicable acts of self-pollution that threaten to bring disorder to the entire human organism; indeed, which might even cause the collapse of civilization itself; nor does his daring stop here, for in 1838 Sylvester Graham will gain notoriety for warning against the evils, not just of male self-pollution, but also of female self-pollution; yes, he will penetrate even into this murky realm, will delve into the particulars of this vice so rife in foreign boardinghouses, if only to prevent the young people of his beloved nation from backsliding into a Sodom of promiscuousness; and when he reflects on the genesis of this work, he thinks back to his courtship of Sara in 1825, for it was then that his own battle was waged, against impure thoughts, against genital excitation, employing the weapons he had at hand: a strict diet of vegetables and unbolted bread, avoidance of coffee and spicy foods, cold baths, prayer and Bible readings, and, in his most desperate moments, a hairshirt worn beneath his underclothes, its rough cords mortifying his flesh and compelling him to keep an exalted image of Sara Earle forever in his mind).

In Little Compton, Rhode Island in the summer of 1825, with Sara Earle’s assistance, Sylvester Graham conducts his first experiments in bread-making. Over dough trough and brick oven, he hovers with the anxious solicitude of a mother tending to a sick infant. He selects only the finest grains. He ferments, he kneads, he mixes. He explains to Sara the superiority of wheat produced by a pure virgin soil, the critical importance of diffusing the yeast equally throughout the saccharine matter. The loaves he produces are light and airy, with a golden hue. But he is restless. Impurities are everywhere, he tells Sarah, and he intends to wage war against them: saleratus, pipe clay, pearlash. (In 1837, he will publish his Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making, in which he warns his readers of a monstrous calamity unfolding in the bakeries of America, the perfidy of commercial bakers, who are artificially enhancing the whiteness and porosity of their loaves with adulterating agents, alum, ammonia, sulphate of copper, the flours of alien vegetables such as beans, peas, and potatoes, yes, most horrifyingly even chalk and plaster of Paris are being mixed into bread to lend it an artificial whiteness, writes Sylvester Graham in 1837, and while it gives him no pleasure to speak ill of anyone, while he is at pains in his treatise to emphasize that his criticisms should not be misconstrued as a blanket condemnation of all commercial bakers – without doubt, he admits, in every city of the nation there are worthy men endeavoring to bake bread of the highest purity without succumbing to the crime of adulteration, and his message is in no way directed at these honest souls – nevertheless, despite these reassurances, his treatise so enrages the bakers of America that when Sylvester Graham and his followers appear in Boston in 1837 for a conference on bread-making at the New Marlborough Hotel, they are met by a violent mob, and the Mayor of Boston warns that his constabulary cannot guarantee their safety, and not for the last time, the Grahamites, as in 1837 they have come to be called, will be forced to take security measures into their own hands; after barricading themselves inside the hotel, they form a shovel brigade on the second floor, and from here they shower caustic lime onto the heads of the rioting bakers below, blinding them and forcing a retreat).

But the beautiful golden-brown loaves that Sylvester Graham removes from the oven during his early baking sessions with Sarah in the summer of 1825 leave him feeling bereft and strangely sad. There they sit on the breadboard, the relics of his quest to bake the perfect loaf of bread, and while Sara admires their shapeliness, their heavenly odor, Sylvester calls them false idols, mere shadows of the ideal. He must press on. His most ardent wish, he tells Sara, is to create a pure and nourishing morsel, stripped of all artifice, which curbs heat and violence and sensuality and joyfully aligns the human temperament with vegetable nature, with nature as God intended it before the Fall. This blessed morsel, which will expand the range of human happiness, which will rid the world of deformity and sickness, of vice and promiscuity, of bellicosity and war: he can see it, nay, he can even taste it! The vision is that close. It shall be his gift to all mankind, he tells Sara; and so, he mixes flour, bran, and wheat germ. He mixes in lard. He is resigned to navigating paths untrod by popular men, and though he will endure his share of critics (chief among them the beastly Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in 1837 will label him the “Prophet of Bran Bread and Pumpkins;” and when word of this barb reaches Sylvester Graham, he shudders; flashbacks to Amherst; the torment of the respectable; but the weakness passes, and his resolve returns; he will not bend under this attack by Emerson, his odious rival on the lecture circuit), though he will be mocked, though the scorn of the ignorant will be heaped upon him, there is nothing the critics can do or say to wipe out the memory of that glorious morning, while baking with Sara Earle in the summer of 1825, when he first removes it from the oven: the small, perfect morsel that his followers will one day christen the Graham Cracker.

2. Philip Hone

In the spring of 1832, cholera threatens North America. For months, New York City newspapers have been tracking the Asiatic scourge as it charts a deadly course from Russia to the British Isles, the newspapers filling with daily reports of European cholera victims who, in a matter of hours and without warning, are transformed from portraits of health into ghastly marionettes in a pantomime of death: their faces blue and twisted, their limbs convulsing and icy to the touch, their mouths spewing black vomit.

It strikes in Canada first. On June 15th, 1832, Philip Hone, former New York City mayor and indefatigable socialite about town, interrupts his diary’s nearly incessant flow of commentary on costume balls and dinner parties and overland journeys by barouche to record that the cholera has reached North America at last, landing in Quebec via a shipload of Irish immigrants. A feeling akin to shame oppresses him. He is stricken. Laying aside his pen, he gazes out the open window of his study. It is a lovely summer day of the sort that would normally cheer his heart, a sky the color of burnished sapphire, the street trees glistening from an early morning burst of rain, the sun beating down on the slate rooftops and hackney carriages. A light southerly breeze billows the curtain; the noise of the bustling metropolis floats up to greet him. Hard to believe, observing this scene, that out there somewhere, just over the blue horizon, a lurking death is steadily approaching, coming here, to his city. At first, he admits, he was skeptical of the danger. There was, to begin, the geographical barrier, the shield wall of the Atlantic Ocean, all those miles of pristine swells and watery currents buffering America from the misery and charnel pits of Europe; and there was, more significantly, the spiritual barrier; for this is a God-fearing land, a land of health and virtue, of industry and plenty, where milkmaids hoist tubs of butter beneath the glowing summer sun, where golden apples swell on the drooping boughs of autumn. This is not a picture of depravity and wretched poverty such as may be found in Europe. A nation so blessed ought never to succumb to the blue death.

And yet, of late, Philip Hone can sense something else: a disturbance bearing down, a dark and sinister force gathering in the shadows. Increasingly, as he walks the streets of New York City, he finds that his gaze is wrenched away from the princely facades of brick and marble towards the unsightliness of unventilated shacks where the wretched sleep ten to a room and share a habitation with livestock. They are becoming impossible to ignore, these slums of mongrel Irish and downtrodden Negroes who seem to be outdoing each other in a race to reach new depths of sloth, criminality, and drunkenness. New York City’s streets are filled with trash. The offal of slaughterhouses, tanneries, breweries, the overflowing sewage of outhouses, all of it is swept together into a stinking mountain of refuse that is piled high on the cobblestones, whose jocular nickname, “corporation pie,” does little to mask its putrid disgustingness. And everywhere, there are the pigs. Thousands of pigs, freely roaming the streets, rollicking in filth. A gentleman dining with his companions in the spring of 1832, might praise the good fortunes of a city in which commerce is thriving; in which freights have more than doubled in two years; in which real estate is in high demand; but then this same gentleman, only a few hours later, might round a corner in broad daylight and be jolted by the sighting of a pig! Indeed, Philip Hone feels stretched between vertiginous polarities. There is, on the one hand, the security of wool being sold for seventy-five cents a pound; there is, on the other, this dizzying morass of pigs, shacks, rubbish. His heart races; his vision clouds. If cholera is to come, it might come to a city such as this.

Images of the clipper ships inbound from Ireland prey upon his mind with peculiar ferocity. He pictures the steerages crammed with skeletal figures dressed in rags, the miasmic air filled with the hum of alien and guttural voices. He imagines storms, gale-force winds hammering the sails for days, the hatches battened down and the passengers tossed about like ragdolls in the darkness. The filth of the latrines caking their hair, their skin, their tattered garments. He pictures the disembarkation points, Quebec, New Brunswick, Boston, New York, the great unwashed herds plodding like cattle through ineffectual quarantine checkpoints and dispersing into the underworld of cities where they darken alleyways and tenements. Fallen women, vicious and dissolute men. It is from these disagreeable souls that the threat of cholera is most dire. He shudders. He calls to mind Bishop Odenkirk, for whom he is thankful. He imagines the blanketing hush that will fall over the Sunday congregations, at Trinity Church in Wall Street, or at St. Peter’s Church in Chelsea, where the only audible sound is the shuffling of feet or the rustle of hymnal pages in the pews, and then, just when the silence seems like it has grown too great to bear, a booming voice will descend from the pulpit, preaching steadfastness in the face of this awful affliction sent from God. The thought is pleasing to Philip Hone. Picking back up his pen, he marks a final sentence in his diary – Bishop Odenkirk has published a very sensible letter to the ministers of the diocese, urging them to make a spiritual use of the apprehended danger – before closing his diary for the day.

3. Asenath Nicholson

The first to die is an Irishman named Fitzgerald. Returning home from work one evening, he complains of an upset stomach. Three days later he is dead. Physicians confirm a diagnosis of Asiatic cholera. Terror sweeps through the streets of New York City. Vibrio cholerae, a tiny bacteria shaped like a comma, which hitches a ride in the small intestine and spreads through polluted water supplies, will not be identified until 1884 when a German microbiologist by the name of Robert Koch unveils its mysteries under a microscope. But in New York City in 1832, there is only guesswork, grasping in the dark. Theories abound. Ingestion of pineapple, excessive eating and drinking, laboring in the heat of day, sitting in a draft of air, intemperance, idleness, filthiness, moral decay: all are suspect. The cholera is a plague sent from God; the cholera is nature’s method of purifying vice; the cholera is a miasma spread through the atmosphere, perhaps by gnats; the cholera can be cured by bloodletting, or by laudanum, or by mercury, or by cayenne pepper, or by tobacco smoke enemas, or by electric shocks, or by prayer, or by fasting, or by injections of saline solutions into the veins, or by herbs, or by plugging the anus with beeswax to stop diarrhea.

New York City empties of people. The roads surrounding the city are clogged with residents fleeing on horseback, in carriages, in wagons, or simply on foot, with their belongings strapped to their backs. But Sylvester Graham sees his chance. Moving in the opposite direction from the tide of humanity rushing to escape New York City, he descends on the beleaguered metropolis with the righteous passion of an avenging angel. He brings the good news: the word of science. There is nothing to fear. At Clinton Hall, on a sweltering afternoon, he takes the stage. Hundreds of people have gathered to hear him speak. Gripping the podium, he surveys the crowd with a gaze that is sharp, crystalline, hawklike. The crisis is grave, he intones in his noble baritone, but it is not hopeless; there is a remedy; what may it be? Not a rustle can be heard in the hall. His listeners are hanging on his every word. But Sylvester Graham is in no hurry. He lets the suspense build. He has learned his trade well. Through long practice, he has mastered the art of word and gesture, the knowledge of how to hold an audience’s attention, to elicit a desired reaction, to maintain composure when a thousand eyes are fixed on him, so that when Sylvester Graham shouts finally – “it is the alimentary canal!” –  a gasp rises from the audience; it is to the alimentary canal, says Sylvester Graham (quieter now), that attention must be turned, if the crisis is to be met head on. The causes of the cholera are numerous, he says, and as a man of science, he will not shy from naming them: they include, but are not limited to, improper quantities of food, improper qualities of food, improper kinds of food, fear, anger, excitement, sloth, exhaustion, fatigue, venereal excess, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, sudden atmospheric changes, the presence of noxious gases, the presence of noxious effluvia, and many other disturbances besides, each of which has the tendency to scatter the vital energies of the body and produce the gastro-intestinal irritation (explains Sylvester Graham), but if the sufferer keeps calm, if he keeps quiet, if he refrains from brandy, from peppermint, and especially from mustard, if he holds to a diet of unbolted wheat gruel, rice water, and bran tea, if he avoids overeating, if he is careful to apply friction over the whole surface of his stomach with a flesh-brush, or a coarse towel, or a flannel, if he avoids air that is confined, or air that is damp, or air that is cold, if he abstains from butter, if he masticates fully, then the irritation will subside and the sufferer will discover at the end of forty-eight hours that his bowels have been returned to a state of perfect health.       

In the audience there is a woman who hears his words and feels that every nerve ending in her body is quivering in the heat of a pure, radiant flame. Her name is Asenath Nicholson. She is a proprietor of a boardinghouse run on the Graham principles, on Cedar Street. She adheres strictly to the Grahamite method. Lights out at 10pm, arousal at 4am, a firm mattress, a daily bath in cold water, cheerfulness, outdoor exercise, chasteness, no alcohol, no caffeine, and a steady diet of raw vegetables and unbolted bread: these are the prescriptions she sets for her boarders so that they might achieve the proper hygiene of body, mind, and soul. For days now, she has been anticipating this chance to see her hero in the flesh. It is an encounter that will change her life forever, an encounter that will blow apart the ramparts of her sheltered life and lead her down pathways that are courageous, extraordinary, surprising: there is a connection, she might say, between this moment watching Sylvester Graham speak in the summer of 1832 and the morning thirteen years later when she will stand on a pier in New York City, and, against the advice of nearly everyone she knows, board a merchant vessel bound for Liverpool and thence on to Dublin. Something in the words of Sylvester Graham moved her that day in 1832, she might say, something mysterious but powerful, and though she will search for the right words to express it all her life, claiming she trembled, invoking Paul on the road to Damascus, turning to scripture in an attempt to justify the tumult of worlds swirling in her blood – in my father’s house are many mansions, being a favorite saying– we are left ultimately with the proof of her works and deeds, with the indisputable fact that Asenath Nicholson in the year 1844, at the age of fifty-three, decides to leave behind her meager worldly possessions in New York City and do something unexpected: she sails to Ireland.

Her sojourn in Ireland will last, intermittently, for four years. In time, her travels will cover the entire island. At first, her mission is obscure. What exactly she is up to in Ireland, is a question that will be asked by more than one observer. Her stated intention is to serve the poor. Fittingly, she spurns the attention of the rich and powerful, preferring instead the company of crofters, laborers, orphaned children, destitute widows. She tours poorhouses in Wexford, attends temperance meetings in Cork, breaks bread with tenants living in rock cabins and cow houses in Kerry. She discharges her ministry alone, mostly on foot, frequently penniless, a figure of unflagging energy in her beaver muff and velvet bonnet, an object of endless curiosity to the country people who turn to old legends of saints and martyrs to make sense of her, but nevertheless she is always welcomed, this eccentric American lady, treated everywhere she goes to the famous hospitality of rural Ireland. And yet not in her wildest dreams would she ever have imagined that she would witness scenes of such horror as those she witnesses in the west of Ireland in the winter of 1847, the blighting of the potato crop, the padlocked tumbledown shacks, the shriveled skin of the starving, whole families turned out of their homes, the evictees ranging across the countryside, scavenging food wherever they can find it, chicken-grass, seagull eggs, turnip tops, seaweed, until at last, weakened from hunger, they are left to die in ditches and sandbanks. And having a front row seat to all of it, Asenath Nicholson sounds the alarm. She enters a mood of ever-increasing desperation. She attempts to communicate to the world the enormous scale of the devastation she is observing. She writes letters begging for American aid and intervention, letters which are published by prominent American newspapers. She raises funds, she helps to coordinate relief efforts, she sleeps in a little rented room on a sofa wedged between barrels of cornmeal and limits her own caloric intake to two servings of stirabout and two pennies worth of bread per day. She distributes food for free, traveling everywhere, visiting garrets, cellars, cabins, and she wakes before dawn each morning to work on the two books which will become her legacy, the first, Ireland’s Welcome to a Stranger, which offers a firsthand account of Irish poverty in the pre-famine years, and the second, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, which is among the most vivid and detailed eyewitness accounts of the Great Irish Famine ever written. She shows none of the pusillanimity of the genteel relief efforts, railing constantly wherever she goes against the criminal callousness of landlords and government officials. In a world gone mad with indifference, Asenath Nicholson presses on, in a single night sometimes marching twenty, thirty miles from village to village, and while for the most part she tries to keep up a cheerful countenance, there are times, bending over a rock wall, or sheltering from the wind and rain in the cavity of a hedgerow, when she is overwhelmed by the suffering that she has seen. A weakness comes upon her, and she feels that she is not in command of her fate at all; that her will is an illusion. That she is merely a puppet, a plaything, blown hither and thither by a dreadful unseen force; for how else to explain her presence here, on this darkened roadside, in this forsaken land where even the arrangement of the stars in the nighttime sky is strange. How shocking she must appear, she thinks – if only her friends in New York could see her now – crouched like a wild animal among the gorse, her feet blistered and sore, her knees scratched and bleeding, her polka dress splattered with mud, her brain so stunted with fear that she is incapable of bringing the words of her favorite hymns to her lips. For her friends did warn her. The foolishness of traveling alone to this desolate place, a widow over fifty. Questioning why she didn’t practice her crusading zeal closer to home. And bending under the onslaught of these remembered complaints, Asenath Nicholson loses heart; she visualizes the light of a solitary candle standing on her bedside table in New York, and in her mind the candlelight blends with the image of a lighthouse, a lighthouse standing on a rocky outcropping on the coast of Maine, or on a cliff overlooking the sea at Montauk, and the signal the lighthouse sends across all those miles of wild ocean is like the pulsing of her own powerful longing, so desperately does she ache for the comforts of home.

But there are other memories that well up to stiffen her resolve. Vermont, the cabin of her girlhood, the bright summer air, a chickadee crying through the open window, peach-er, peach-er, as she sits in a nook by the chimney and listens to her mother read aloud from the Bible, and suddenly, clear as a bell, she can hear her mother’s voice, speaking to her across all those leagues of space and time: be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. And 1832, that dreadful summer when cholera was at the gates, when Sylvester Graham came to speak in New York City, and Asenath Nicholson stood in the crowded hall and looked up at the figure at the podium, and what she thought was that he looked like a man who after long searching has found his proper place at last; his words, sonorous and rich, spilling into the cavernous air of the great hall, holding forth a vision of light and goodness, a science of life, the parts of the body in angelic concord with the harmonies of the spirit, the realm of the physical at peace with the mystery that lies beyond; and dwelling upon these memories in the Irish countryside in 1847, Asenath Nicholson feels the fiery sap come coursing into her veins once more; her pathway through the night appears less baleful; wind cannot halt her, rain cannot halt her; she hears the call, and she knows that she must obey it, the voice speaking out of the whirlwind that tells her that she has been made desolate for a reason, that hers is not the way that is smooth or easy, that she is wanted for other purposes.

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Note: this is a work of fiction, but I consulted several sources to write it. On Sylvester Graham and his followers, I’m indebted to Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform by Stephen Nissenbaum, Vegetarian America: A History by Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo, as well as Graham’s own writings. On Philip Hone and the cholera epidemic of 1832, I relied on The Diary of Philip Hone and The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866 by Charles Rosenberg. On Asenath Nicholson, I’m indebted to Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine by Maureen O’Rourke Murphy, as well as Nicholson’s own writings.

Seph Murtagh is a writer living in Ithaca, New York. His fiction and essays have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Socrates on the Beach, and The Missouri Review. He’s a winner of the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize from The Missouri Review, and his work has been cited as notable in Best American Essays. Twitter: @sephmurtagh