ABSTRACT
In January 1904, the editors of The Lancet took the unusual step of endorsing a dietetic fad. ‘Popular crazes in matters of medicine … are more often than not things to be deplored,’ they wrote. ‘If they are not actually harmful they are generally ridiculous, and if they are of no benefit to the general public assuredly they are, as a rule, of equally little advantage to the medical profession.’ 1 This craze, however, was an exception. In the editors’ view ‘a more generally beneficial doctrine could hardly be chosen for the popular medical idol of the moment’.
