Health and Efficiency (later published as 'Maintaining Health')

Hardcover 12mo, 408pp. Very Good with rubbing to the tips and mottled foxing to the boards; contents lightly age-toned . Rear hinge neatly reinforced with Japanese paper; binding sound. Several faded stamps across the endpapers for San Diego chiropractor Stanley Williams ("Nervous and Mental Cases a Specialty") and diamond-shaped sticker for the Ulmer Physician Supplies of Chicago on the rear pastedown ("Everything Except Drugs").

The first book published by Norwegian-American doctor Rasmus Larssen Alsaker, later reworked as Eating for Health and Efficiency and Maintaining Health, published in editions from 1917-1920s. Alsaker was a credentialed M.D. with a predilection for quackery. He believed his "Alsaker Way" could cure just about any ailment, causing outcry from medical experts who believed he was misleading the public for profit. He edited the magazine 'The key to health' in the 1930s and later became the medical director of Bernarr Macfadden's "Health Service Bureau," legitimizing his colleague's dubious claims about health and wellness.