author
Edward Hooker Dewey
d. 1904
Best remembered for promoting the "No Breakfast Plan," this 19th-century American physician wrote lively, confident books about fasting, diet, and everyday health. His work became widely read at a time when alternative ideas about medicine were finding a big public audience.
1 Audiobook
The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure
by Edward Hooker Dewey
About the author
Born in 1837 and dying in 1904, Edward Hooker Dewey was an American physician whose career combined conventional medical training with strongly independent health ideas. He earned his medical degree from the College of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Michigan in 1864, served as an assistant surgeon in the United States Army, and later practiced in Meadville, Pennsylvania.
Dewey became known for arguing that many illnesses could be improved through fasting and simpler eating habits. He is especially associated with the "No Breakfast Plan," a phrase that helped make his views memorable to general readers. Among his books are The True Science of Living and The No-Breakfast Plan and the Fasting Cure, works that helped spread his ideas well beyond his medical practice.
Today, he is remembered less as a mainstream medical authority than as a notable early advocate of fasting-based health reform. Even so, his books offer a vivid glimpse into turn-of-the-century debates about diet, self-discipline, and what it meant to live healthfully.