Brain and Brawn.
Devoted to the Welfare of Humanity / Devoted to Nature Cures, Hygiene, Nutrition and Exercise.
A magazine for those who think
Other titles: Brain and Brawn Advertiser
1912--1917 Monthly
Los Angeles, CA.
Editor: Harry Ellington Brook, N.D.
Publisher: Naturopathic Publishing Company, Inc.
Succeeds: The Wasp: A Saturday journal of illustration and comment, devoted to the discussion of public affairs, finance, society and art (editor, San Francisco)
1/1, June 1912-October 1917.
$1.00 a year, 38 pp. (plus almost half again as many pages of advertisements).

Brook (1849-1924) was a journalist and booster for Southern California, publishing Land of Sunshine: Southern California (1893). He was born in London and came to the United States in the 1870s, already convinced of the value of "nature cures," and found his natural home in Los Angeles in 1886 where he worked for the Los Angeles Times (writing a "Care of the Body" column) until his death except for five years publishing this journal.

Brook, unlike many similar nature-cure advocates, expressed his views with style and humor and curmudgeonly opined in crotchety fashion on every subject from the beauties of California, to "Love is an occasional outcropping of sex impulse," to the rejection of the Puritanical approach to health and the joys of "Eating as a Fine Art" shown in Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 Physiologie du Gout, and he digressed on the oddities of our views on nudism through the ages, the errors of persuading mothers to drink wine, beer or whiskey in order to have plenty of milk, suicide by the knife and fork method, women should be free to do what they want after 30 ("The girl who wants to be unconventional should wait until she is 30 to try), the possible eugenic benefits of the Oneida Community experiments, etc. He reprinted long excerpts from the speech of J.M. Peebles on his 94th birthday: "Being asked a while since if I would not like to be young again, my prompt reply was, No -- a thousand times No! As well ask the acorn-burdened oak if it would like to be a puny sapling again, or the bright-winged butterfly if it would go back to the chrysalis stage of life. Grand is that period of time when the grayed hairs appear and when the curves and furrows are chiseled upon the facial features. They symbolize experiences, studies and wisdom. Candidly I seek no backward voyage across the sea of life."

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