Nathan Allen: social reformer and health advocate.

Abstract

NATHAN ALLEN WAS BORN IN 1813 in Princeton, Mass, and grew up working on his family’s farm. When the family couldn’t afford to send him to college, a friend helped pay his tuition at Amherst College, where he graduated in 1836 and then spent some time teaching. He later entered the medical department of Pennsylvania College, earning his MD in 1841. While in medical school, Allen was appointed editor of the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, to which he contributed many editorials, letters, and book reviews. He then settled in Lowell, Mass, and practiced medicine there for the rest of his life.1 Figure 1 Allen was an advocate of public health and preventive medicine, believing that it was far preferable to prevent disease than to cure it. He argued for a “great general law of propagation applicable to all organic life” whereby the overactivity of any one organ tended to diminish the activity of other organs and lead to diminished fertility.2 He tried to demonstrate that the low birth rate of native New Englanders (compared with that of immigrants) was due to impaired physical condition. In 1850, Allen published An Essay on the Opium Trade, an attack on the British for promoting the cultivation of opium in India and forcing it on the Chinese people.3 He subsequently wrote numerous papers on population and vital statistics, physical and mental culture, insanity and heredity, state medicine and public health, obstetrics and maternity, and the education of women. Some 40 of his articles were later collected and republished in Physical Development, or the Laws Governing the Human System.4 Allen was a leading voice in the debate over the social and philosophical questions of his day. He was known as a friend to the poor and destitute, and a reformer of institutions for their care, urging the more humane treatment of prisoners and the insane. He earned the wrath of many wealthy and influential citizens by becoming a strong public advocate of the “ten hour law” to limit the maximum hours of daily work. Allen was appointed to the Massachusetts State Board of Charities and the Lowell Board of Health and gave many years of free service to the city dispensary. In 1872, he was named a delegate to an international congress in London on prison reform. Appointed commissioner of lunacy for Massachusetts, he was responsible for an 1875 report advocating reform of that state’s mental asylums. In 1857, Allen was chosen by the Massachusetts legislature to be a trustee of Amherst College, a post he held until his death in 1889. In that capacity, he was instrumental in establishing the Department of Physical Culture and the ceaseless promotion of health and physical education.