The following is the only portion of my thesis from 28 years ago which I apparently never published on this blog. I was recently reminded of this Appendix 3 while talking about how Adelle Davis' various best-selling books were all mentioned in the substantial June 1, 1974 New York Times obituary, except one. Her book about LSD, authored under the pseudonym "Jane Dunlap," was evidently hidden. This obituary was what led me during my thesis research to Davis' son George Leisey, who well recalled being interviewed by the Times obit writer Wolfgang Saxon. Leisey told me that he certainly had spoken about the LSD book to Saxon, and he never knew why an important part of his mother's life had gone unmentioned. This may be over-obvious now.
The text below completes the serialization (on this blog) of my 1998 Northwestern University history thesis. With psychedelic drugs all the rage in psychiatry more than half a century after Adelle Davis' death, some lessons from the 1950s and 60s may be urgently worth learning. (Refer to SLOUCHING, parts 1-14 published on this blog between October 2018 and May 2019.) My sense is that many details of that earlier story will repeat themselves all too precisely, and what's currently called a "psychedelic renaissance" won't even be close to a good thing in the final view of history.
Understanding what happened in the USA, specifically with LSD between 1945 and 1975, is a critical errand in our new age of rage and confusion. We cannot make social policy or medical science by blind reaction to developing events, such as orthodox psychiatry's abject failure to ameliorate mental/emotional/behavioral difficulties with what they have laughingly called "medicine".
The single, fundamental concept that psychedelic drugs insistently present as the basis for social improvement is a simple two-word phrase: NO CONTROL! This also means no responsibility and no understanding. It turns the human species into a herd of animals who do not think, but only stampede randomly. "Social improvement" and "spiritual enlightenment" combine into a very dark guise for nihilism and anarchy, the actual goals of psychiatry. The hour of Yeats' rough beast has perhaps come round at last.
The music's over, baby!
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Adelle Davis, Best-Selling Author, Nutritionist, Dies
PALOS VERDES ESTATES, Calif., May 31 (UPI)—Adelle Davis, one of the nation's best known authorities on nutrition, who contended that almost any disease could be prevented by proper diet, died at her home today of bone cancer. She was 70 years old.
Miss Davis had written four widely read books and made countless lecture and television appearances with the message, “You are what you eat.”
She had been undergoing chemotherapy treatments and recently returned from a hospital to her home in this Los Angeles suburb.
She is survived by her husband, Frank Sieglinger, a, lawyer; a son, George Leisey, and a daughter, Mrs. Barbara Frodahl.
A funeral service is to be held Monday.
An Outspoken Believer
By WOLFGANG SAXON
The guru of lay nutritionists, Adelle Davis was a strong and outspoken believer in a healthful diet as the key to well‐being, and she propounded her message in books that sold in the millions and as a television talk‐show guest who would mince no words.
When informed last year that she was suffering from cancer of the bone marrow, Miss Davis later recalled, her reaction was one of shock and disbelief. “I thought this was for people who drink soft drinks, who eat white bread, who eat refined sugar and so on,” she told an interviewer.
Miss Davis said her first thought was, “I have been a failure.” But in reviewing her life, she concluded that while she had eaten well on the Indiana farm on which she grew up, she changed her diet for the worse when she went away to college and ate what she called “junk food” until the nineteenfifties.
Until recently the picture of health, with glowing skin, Miss Davis castigated Americans for paying a lot of money for food that, she said, couldn't be unhealthier if it had been designed that way. “A woman wants to murder her husband can do it thoroughly in the kitchen,” she once said in the blunt way of speaking that was one of her trademarks. “There won't even be an inquest.”
She bristled at the very thought of “enriched” white bread and packaged mixes, and advocated whole‐grain bread, milk, fresh fruit and vegetables, an egg or two and some cheese every day and liver and fish several times a week.
On the question of cholesterol, she told an interviewer once, “We need choesterol in the body.”
Advocate of Vitamins
Miss Davis was among the country's most vocal proponents of vitamins to supplement a good diet, and she swallowed dozens of vitamin pills daily. She also carried her own brewer's yeast wherever her lectures or television appearances would take her, and at home in California she played tennis five times a week until recently.
Miss Davis's books—“Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit,” “Let's Cook It Right,” Let's Get Well” and “Let's Have Healthy Children”—were entitled as positively as she sounded in person.
They also sold more than two and a half million copies in hard covers and about seven, million in paperback.
University based nutritionists often tended to agree with what she said about bad dietary habits and the poor nutrition of Americans, regardless of income. But they objected that she derived her conclusions mainly from anecdotal evidence or from an unscientific approach to the subject.
Thus, they would seize upon her suggestion that Germany conquered France in World War II because German black bread and beer were nutritionally superior to French white bread and wine, her warning that Russians eat much less of what she said were illness‐breeding refined foods than do Americans, or her statement that there was no crime where there was good diet, while, she noted, the murderous Manson clan of Southern California had subsisted mainly on candy bars.
Yet Miss Davis did have an academic and practical background in her field. After leaving her native farm in Union Township, Indiana, where she was born the last of five girls, she attended Purdue University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California at Berkeley, where shse majored in dietetics. Fellow students at Purdue called her “Vitamin Davis” in 1924 because she talked about vitamins incessantly as she pursued the search for information on nutrition.
Dietitian at Bellevue
She went to work as a dietitian at Bellevue Hospital in New York, supervised nutrition in the Yonkers public schools and, in 1931, became a consulting nutritionist for three New York obstetricians. During that period, she also wrote two small books and a textbook.
Later in the thirties, she moved to California, married—and was subsequently divorced —and earned a master's degree in biochemistry at the University of Southern California. Again she worked as a consultant nutritionist, for California clinics, and planned thousands of individual diets for people suffering from a great variety of illnesses or malfunctions.
Miss Davis was one crusader and mother who was hardly surprised when consumerism and the demand for organic food came to the fore in recent years, with millions of Americans who began to take the warnings of nutritionists more seriously.
Yet she witnessed the sudden proliferation of “health food” stores with a wary eye. “It's tragic the junk a lot of them sell, the misstatements they make,” she said recently. She also observed that cancer, in her opinion, was related to the inadequacies of the American diet, and voiced the hope that her illness would not dishearten people who had held her nutritional advice in high regard.
Miss Davis, who with her second husband grew vegetables and fruit in their garden, recommended a minimum daily vitamin supplement that might include vitamin C, at least 100 units of vitamin E and one or two fish‐liver oil tablets, the source of both vitamins A and D.
“And if you want to feel twice as good, brewer's yeast,” she would remark.
