We Knew This in 1906: What Modern Medicine Is Still Getting Wrong About Whole-Person Health

By Deborah Holmen, M.Ed., NBCT, CLC

What the last century in medicine has taught us and how echoes of past practices still resonate today.

The Gulick Hygiene Series taught schoolchildren that body, mind, and spirit are one inseparable system. Over a century of research has proved them right, so why are we still practicing medicine like they’re not?

There’s a particular kind of humility that comes from being an educator. You spend enough years in a classroom, and you quickly learn that the most important ideas are rarely the newest ones. Sometimes I think the longer something has been forgotten, the more urgently we need to rediscover it. I've also wondered why the older generations before World War II seemed better educated in all areas of the arts, Latin, mathematics, the sciences, and more.

I stumbled across the Gulick Hygiene Series the way you stumble across most important things — sideways, while looking for something else. Published between 1906 and 1910 by scientific advisor and editor Dr. Luther Halsey Gulick and his sister, Frances Gulick Jewett, these five volumes were designed as a school curriculum. They covered good health, emergencies, urban sanitation, the physiology of the working body, and, in the fifth book, which stopped me cold — the control of body and mind. Together.

Not as a metaphor. As a medical fact.

What Gulick Understood That We Keep Rediscovering

Gulick was a physician, a physical educator, and the man who commissioned the invention of basketball, among other things. His entire professional philosophy rested on a single conviction: that a human being is a unified system of body, mind, and spirit, and that you cannot treat one without affecting all three.

His entire professional philosophy rested on a single conviction: that a human being is a unified system of body, mind, and spirit, and that you cannot treat one without affecting all three.

He built this idea into the YMCA’s founding triangle symbol in 1895. He built it into the curriculum taught to thousands of American children. And then, somewhere along the way, medicine moved on toward specialization, toward the treatment of isolated systems, toward the fifteen-minute appointment and the referral to the specialist down the hall.

What Gulick knew intuitively, modern science spent decades fighting to prove. In 1975, psychologist Robert Ader and immunologist Nicholas Cohen at the University of Rochester published a landmark experiment demonstrating that immune responses could be conditioned by classical behavioral cues — the brain and the immune system were, in fact, talking to each other constantly (Psychosomatic Medicine, 1975). Ader coined the term psychoneuroimmunology to describe what he’d found, and mainstream medicine greeted the idea, according to his colleagues, with “heated skepticism and sometimes scorn.” He kept going anyway.

Today, research in the field he founded documents that chronic stress measurably weakens white blood cell response to viruses and cancer cells, that wounds heal more slowly under psychological stress, and that vaccination is less effective in people carrying high emotional burdens. The mind is not a passenger in the body. It is part of the operating system.

The Childhood Health Crisis Nobody Wants to Talk About

The fifth book in the Gulick Series was aimed at children. That was the point. These weren’t medical texts for physicians — they were tools to teach young people how they thought, how they felt, how they moved, and how they lived in community with others would shape their health for life. Gulick understood that prevention was a practice, not a procedure, and that it had to start early.

In 1998, Drs. Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda at Kaiser Permanente published what became known as the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. After studying more than 17,000 adults, they found that childhood emotional, physical, and psychological experiences didn’t stay in childhood — they embedded themselves in the body, driving adult rates of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, addiction, and early death in a dose-dependent relationship. The more adverse experiences a child had in childhood, the greater the risk across nearly every major health category.

The numbers on this are ones every parent, teacher, and physician should have memorized. The National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R) — a landmark NIMH-funded study led by Dr. Ronald Kessler at Harvard Medical School and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2005 — surveyed over 9,000 adults and found that half of all lifetime mental illness begins by age 14, and three-quarters of it by age 24. NIMH Director Thomas Insel called the finding plainly: "Mental disorders are the chronic disorders of young people in the U.S.," And yet the same study documented that despite effective treatments existing, many people wait decades between first onset and when they actually receive care. We are letting the window close on the population most vulnerable to it, and we have known this for twenty years.

...half of all lifetime mental illness begins by age 14, and three-quarters of it by age 24.

The ACE Study showed, as the CDC now states plainly, that adverse childhood experiences “can alter the structural development of neural networks and the biochemistry of neuroendocrine systems," accelerating disease, compromising immunity, and shortening life.

Gulick would not have been surprised. He was already building preventive health education for children in 1906. We spent nearly a century ignoring the evidence that he was right.

The numbers on this are ones every parent, teacher, and physician should have memorized. The National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R) — a landmark NIMH-funded study led by Dr. Ronald Kessler at Harvard Medical School and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2005 — surveyed over 9,000 adults and found that half of all lifetime mental illness begins by age 14, and three-quarters of it by age 24.

NIMH Director Thomas Insel called the finding plainly: “Mental disorders are the chronic disorders of young people in the U.S.,” And yet the same study documented that despite effective treatments existing, many people wait decades between first onset and when they actually receive care. We are letting the window close on the population most vulnerable to it, and we have known this for twenty years.

The Community Piece We Keep Undervaluing

What strikes me most, reading Gulick now, is how relentlessly he returned to one idea: that health is not a solo project. He argued that individual behavior is shaped by interpersonal relationships and that values, including health values, are fundamentally collective. His curriculum included urban sanitation, civic responsibility for clean water and clean air, and the community's role in disease prevention. He built the Camp Fire Girls on the same conviction.

Modern medicine has largely treated health as individual biology. Social determinants of poverty, community connection, environmental pollution, and early relational safety have been acknowledged in public health literature for decades, but remain awkwardly marginal in most clinical practice.

Research by Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University has found that social isolation carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Loneliness is not a feelings problem. It is a physiological one, with measurable immune and cardiovascular consequences. Gulick built teamwork and social belonging into his physical education philosophy, not because it was nice, but because he understood it was necessary.

Play, Movement, and What We’ve Medicalized Out of Existence

The Gulick Series’ third book addressed hygiene and health in urban environments — and even there, Gulick’s framework insisted on movement, play, and physical engagement as non-negotiable elements of a healthy life, not optional add-ons for the disciplined few. He didn’t call it exercise. He called it what it was — a fundamental human need.

It took until 2018 for the American College of Sports Medicine to formally campaign for exercise to be recognized as a first-line clinical treatment. The research now supporting that position spans hundreds of trials documenting movement’s effectiveness in reducing depression, anxiety, cognitive decline, cardiovascular disease risk, and inflammatory markers across dozens of conditions. Gulick prescribed this in elementary school. It took medicine 112 years to catch up.

What We Owe the Past

I’m not arguing that we trade evidence-based medicine for century-old textbooks. Modern pharmacology, surgical techniques, and diagnostic imaging have saved lives that could not have been saved in Gulick’s era. That’s not the point.

The point is that we abandoned a framework before we had anything better to replace it. We built medicine around the body as a machine, isolated systems, isolated symptoms, isolated prescriptions, and in doing so, we lost the oldest and most durable insight into the history of health: that a person is whole, and that healing requires treating them that way.

Psychoneuroimmunology confirmed it. The ACE Study confirmed it. Social epidemiology confirmed it. Exercise science confirmed it. The whole turn of the century hygiene movement, at its best, was trying to teach us the same thing in plain language to twelve-year-olds.

Maybe it’s time we let it.

Deborah Holmen is an author, ghostwriter, and a retired National Board Certified Teacher. She writes at the intersection of wellness, nature, and the stubborn wisdom embedded in things we forgot to keep.

Thank you, Janae Daniels, from the schooltohomeschoolpodcast.com, for rediscovering The Gulick Hygiene Series.