Between the Covers

Hardcover. Oblong quarto 10" x 8.5". String-tied black cloth over stiff paper boards with "photographs" stamped in gilt on the front board. Contains 165 sepia-toned or black and white gelatin silver photographs with some captions. Near fine album with near fine photographs.

A photo album documenting the treatment of children and teenagers at Dr. Henry Lindlahr’s Nature Cure Sanitarium in Elmhurst, Illinois in 1918. The photos in this album show children and their families enjoying the “Nature Cure” in both the summer and winter. The entrance to “Dr. Lindlahr’s Health Resort” is seen here as well as toddlers and young children, often with attendant or their well-to-do parents, playing in the summer sunshine and winter snow. The album follows the activities of the “resort” depicting young girls dressed in nurse’s costumes, a small groups of naked children frolicking in a wading pool, and bloomer-clad young women engaged in outdoor calisthenics.

Lindlahr claimed to have learned about the Nature Cure while in Europe from an uneducated German farmer who was a renowned healer. He also was a graduate of the National Medical University of Chicago, a dubious, short-lived school that lasted less than five years and was never recognized by the Illinois State Board of Health. His son, Victor, also the holder of a diploma-mill medical degree, assumed management of the institute and used it his father’s naturopathic journals to promote a variety of patent medicines including Serutan and Geritol. After the senior Lindlahr’s death, the sanitarium closed in 1924 following a series of “irregularities.”

Lindlahr was an early promoter of the “Nature Cure,” which rejected allopathic medicine and instead promoted the belief that all sickness and disease was caused by “lowered vitality” (due to overwork, overstimulation, medicinal drugs, and surgical procedures), “abnormal composition of blood and lymph” (due to poor diet and lack of mineral salts), and “accumulation of waste matter” (due to the first two reasons plus the use of alcohol, narcotics, and other stimulants as well as accidental poisoning). All could be cured, he maintained through the “exercise of reason, will and self-control;” returning to the “natural habits of life” in eating, dressing, working, resting, and sexual conduct; the “stoppage of all leaks” by rest, sleep, diet, and magnetic treatment; and proper “elimination” which could be promoted by fasting, light and air baths, hydrotherapy, chiropractic manipulations, and curative gymnastics and sports. Lindlahr, also proponent of “natural eugenics” maintained,

“When parents . . . create children in accord with natural law, . . . mold their bodies and their characters into harmony and beauty . . . and rear their offspring in health of body and purity of mind in harmony with the laws of their being, then we shall have true types of beautiful manhood and womanhood, then children will no longer be a curse and a burden to themselves and to those who bring them into the world or to society at large. . . . Children thus born and reared in harmony with the law will be the future masters of the earth.”

Lindlahr put his theories to work in 1914, when he purchased an eight acre property in Elmhurst, Illinois and established his Sanitarium where patients could receive his “Nature Cure” in a bucolic setting. For $25/week and up, his patients received room, board, daily treatments, and professional consultation. Lindlahr’s “resort” attracted wealthy clientele which allowed him to expand his institution from its original fortress like building to include an administration building, a medical college, an annex with additional baths, parlors, porches, bungalows, and a summer tent camp. The photos in this album show children and their families enjoying the “Nature Cure” in both the summer and winter

A unique first-hand visual record of an early sanitarium established by one of the founders of naturopathic medicine and its effort to “create children” who “will be the future masters of the earth.”.

Item #422988