Dear Doctor Franklin:

As you get out onto the streets of Philadelphia, you will notice a remarkable number of fat people waddling about. Perhaps your return will cause renewed interest in your recommendation: “Eat and drink such an exact quantity as the constitution of thy body allows of, in reference to the services of the mind.” Indeed, we all should heed this advice from Poor Richard: “Excess in all other things whatever, as well as in meat and drink, is also to be avoided.”

While a younger man, you advocated daily exercise and restrained dining; you seemed particularly concerned about the effects of overeating. Poor Richard advised: “Many dishes, many diseases,” and “He that never eats too much will never be lazy.”

Your warning about eating habits and temperance, especially as it relates to a full belly, certainly makes sense to anyone today who walks out of a dining room stuffed to near explosion: “That quantity that is sufficient, the stomach can perfectly concoct and digest, and it sufficeth the due nourishment of the body.…The difficulty lies, in finding out an exact measure.”

Your words, sir, are truer today than in your own time because the portions served are now so large: “If thou eatest so much as makes thee unfit for study, or other business, thou exceedest the due measure.” Your ideas on due measure appear elsewhere in your writing as well: “If thou art dull and heavy after meat, it’s a sign thou hast exceeded the due measure; for meal and drink ought to refresh the body, and make it cheerful, and not to dull and oppress it.”

We’d all find it easier to resist temptation if we followed your suggestion to “keep out of the sight of feasts and banquets as much as may be; for ’tis more difficult to refrain good cheer, when it’s present, than from the desire of it when it is away.”

In fact, after the huge meal I had last night, I’m going to try your proposal to “fast the next meal, and all may be well again, provided it be not too often done; as if he exceed at dinner, let him refrain a supper.”

The hazards of overeating seemed much on your mind, yet in spite of your Puritan upbringing in Boston and your Quaker readers in Philadelphia, you never invoked divine condemnation of gluttony, only sound recommendations any modern nutritionist would offer.
Today’s experts, for example, grumble that our mode of seasoning food stimulates overeating. Their thought is hardly new, considering this query to your club, the Junto Society: “Whether those meats and drinks are not the best, that contain nothing but their natural tastes, nor have any thing added by art so pleasing as to induce us to eat or drink when we are not athirst or hungry.”

You were also centuries ahead of your time with this advice: “Use now and then a little exercise a quarter of an hour before meals, as to swing a weight, or swing your arms about with a small weight in each hand; to leap, or the like, for that stirs the muscles of the breast.” Moreover, my colleagues have confirmed the value of your observation: “A temperate diet arms the body against all external accidents; so that they are not so easily hurt by heat, cold, or labour; if they at any time should be prejudiced, they are more easily cured, either of wounds, dislocations or bruises.”

Finally, I should inform you that modern scientists have determined that rats kept on sparse diets live longer and remain healthier than those allowed unrestricted access to food. I doubt you’ll find such results surprising, considering this statement posed to members of the Junto Society: “Whether it is worth a rational man’s while to forego the pleasure arising from the present luxury of the age in eating and drinking and artful cookery, studying to gratify the appetite for the sake of enjoying healthy old age, a sound mind and a sound body, which are the advantages reasonably to be expected from a more simple and temperate diet.”

Dr. Green is a member of the Board of Directors of Friends of Franklin, Inc. His book, Dear Doctor Franklin: E-mails to a Founding Father about Science, Medicine and Technology, is available at Amazon.com.

To read the first e-mail conversation and more, visit saturdayeveningpost.com/ben-franklin.

An E-mail to Ben Franklin The Saturday Evening Post

Here’s what Ben Franklin would say: “Been thither, done that.”

During the winter of 1755-56, Ben Franklin, a civilian like Obama, raised and commanded the largest militia in British North America.

Raids by Native Americans on towns in western Pennsylvania stimulated the action. The Shawnee, distressed by incursion into their territory by Europeans, responded as one would expect. Tales of massacres soon reached Philadelphia where pacifist Quakers, reluctant to engage in combat themselves, gave financial support to Franklin’s call to establish a militia, which would march westward to aid settlers with fort construction (and warfare with the natives if necessary).

Franklin suggested that the militia’s soldiers elect their own officers. As he put it: “It seems likely that the people will engage more readily in the service, and face danger with more intrepidity, when they are commanded by a man they know and esteem, and on whose prudence and courage, as well as goodwill and integrity, they can have reliance, than they would under a man they either did not know, or did not like.”

Needless to say, the men elected Franklin to lead them. He was, after all, Pennsylvania’s most prominent citizen. Ben Franklin declined the term “general” for his position, accepting “colonel” instead. Nevertheless, when Franklin and his brigade visited the Moravians en route west, the locals addressed him as “General Franklin.”

After successfully constructing forts in three Pennsylvania locations, Franklin and his army returned to Philadelphia. Soon thereafter, on March 16, 1756, Colonel Franklin marched part of his militia past Pennsylvania’s Royal Governor—a man who viewed Franklin with suspicion. (Franklin wanted the Pennsylvania family—owners of much Pennsylvania land—to pay their fair share of the militia’s cost, something they refused to do.) This show of strength did not go unnoticed by the governor.

The next day, when Franklin left Philadelphia to attend a meeting in Virginia, his troops gave him a military send-off, accompanying him to the ferry terminal with swords drawn — an inappropriate gesture, according to proper military etiquette. When Franklin found this out, he decided that he had had enough of martial displays. As he wrote about the incident: “For tho’ a great number met me at my return, they did not ride with drawn swords, having been told the ceremony was improper. … I who am totally ignorant of military ceremonies, and above all things averse to making show and parade, or doing any useless thing that can serve only to excite envy or provoke malice, suffered at the time much more pain than I enjoy’d pleasure, and have never since given an opportunity for anything of the sort.”

I wonder if President Obama was thinking the same as he reviewed the troops, knowing that in less than 72 hours he’d be asking generals to prepare a plan to withdraw soldiers from Iraq and redeploy them into Afghanistan.

President Obama’s Inaugural Parade The Saturday Evening Post

Why, you might wonder, did Ben Franklin select me, a California orthopedic surgeon, as his spokesperson? Why didn’t he choose one of his 32,000 living descendants? Why hasn’t he picked as his mouthpiece a University of Pennsylvania professor, or an official of the Library Company of Philadelphia, or a member of The American Philosophical Society (all affiliated with institutions Franklin founded)? Why, for that matter, doesn’t he speak for himself?

Well, if these are your questions, you really should be asking how a dead guy could pick anyone to do anything! After all, Ben Franklin reportedly expired on April 17, 1790, after a long illness characterized by painful bladder stones, gout, and pneumonia.

So here’s the answer.

Not long ago, I wrote a book about Ben Franklin as a scientist and medical researcher. The book differs from other Franklin biographies because I directed it to the great man himself. Before Franklin died, you see, he wrote that flies drowned in wine could be revived by putting them out in the sun. Franklin proclaimed: “I should prefer to any ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira wine … then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country!”

In my book, I assumed that Franklin, near the end of his life and heavily medicated with opium, was immersed by his doctor in a barrel of Madeira and buried somewhere in Philadelphia to await future unearthing. Presuming that Franklin would spend his first few weeks after disencaskment at Pennsylvania Hospital, I prepared for him numerous emails updating his conjectures, inventions, and ideas. Thus evolved Dear Doctor Franklin: Emails to a Founding Father About Science, Medicine, and Technology.

At my book’s end, the barrel containing Franklin’s wine-soaked body isn’t found, so the claim that he’s entombed in Christ Church’s cemetery at the corner of Philadelphia’s Fifth and Arch Streets remains unchallenged. Nevertheless, since I cling to the possibility that Franklin actually carried out his Madeira scheme and will soon return, who’s better qualified to speak for him than his own pen pal? Indeed, I’m the only living person to have actually communicated with Dr. Benjamin Franklin: our discourse comprises 85 emails (admittedly all one-sided) tracing Franklin’s ideas and inventions from his time to our own.

Introducing the Benjamin Franklin Blog The Saturday Evening Post