Featured on PDR in the collection A Treatise on the All-Healing Qualities of Earth Bathing (1790)

Long before “earthing mats” became a pseudoscientific health trend and Japanese “cedar enzyme baths” went viral, James Graham (1745–94) encouraged his readers to bury themselves alive in the name of health. He called the practice EARTH-BATHING or “animal purification”, and explicated its benefits with the breathless, subclause-dense enthusiasms of eighteenth-century syntax: “immersing or placing the naked Human Body, up to the chin, or lips, or rather covered up over the head, but leaving the eyes and nose uncovered for seeing and breathing freely, in fresh dug up Earth, or in the Sand of the Sea-shore, for three, six, or twelve hours at one time, and repeatedly, hath been recommended, and actually practiced, with constant, and with infallible success, by Sea-faring Foreigners, as well as by…