[gallery]
“Physical Culture” was a 19th Century movement that can best be described as “heavy gymnastics,” as in gymnastics with aspects of what we’d call weight training today.
The creator of the magazine was Bernarr MacFadden, who was a former circus wrestler turned publisher, kind of a nut, and maybe one of the most interesting people of the early 20th Century. Bernarr MacFadden wrote all kinds of works entitled things like Weakness: A Crime, Vitality Supreme, and my personal favorite, Virile Powers of Superb Manhood. Not only was he vegetarian and a compulsive exerciser, he also believed sex and free love was healthy. Lots of orgies were held in his “healthatoriums,” and he even founded a religious cult based on his health theories, “cosmotarianism.” Kind of like how people say Crossfit or veganism are kind of cultish today.
On a scifi pulp note, his publishing empire at one point owned Amazing Stories after 1931.
Macfadden was friends with Mussolini and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When his daughter died of a heart condition, he said, “it’s better she’s gone; she only would have disgraced me.” On the other hand, he believed doctors were quacks, and though he claimed he would be the first man to live to be 150, he died because he refused antibiotics for a urinary tract infection.
