1867 Autograph Letter Signed by Diocletian Lewis, Inventor of the Beanbag, Homeopath, Health Advocate.

Diocletian Lewis, also known as Dr. Dio Lewis, had some medical training, but did not have a medical degree…

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Letter from Diocletian Lewis, homeopath and temperance and health advocate, here writing about an upcoming lecture in Peoria, Illinois for the Western Literary Association.

Lewis writes about a month after the burning down of the girls’ school he conducted in Lexington, Massachusetts. Teachers or lecturers at Lewis’ school included abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld and women’s education advocate Catherine Beecher. After this disaster, Lewis turned his attention to lecturing across the country on temperance and women’s education. Writing to a friend, Lewis declares:

I am glad to hear that you will be at the lecture, and if the trains will permit I shall certainly do myself the great pleasure to call upon you. Tell Minnie not to fail to be present at the lecture in Peoria. I do not know when my lecture is to be delivered. The Western Literary Association, of which George L. Tisbert of Dubuque, Iowa is secretary, regulates my lectures in the West.

ANB notes: “ In 1864 Lewis founded a girls’ school in Lexington, Massachusetts, to put into practice his ideas on physical education as well as his pedagogical philosophy ... After his girls’ school burned in 1867, Lewis returned to the lecture circuit to champion the twin causes of women’s health (to be achieved through exercise and loose, comfortable clothing) and women’s autonomy (to be gained through entry into all respectable occupations, equal pay for equal work, and “voluntary motherhood,” i.e., freedom from unwanted pregnancy).”

Diocletian Lewis, also known as Dr. Dio Lewis, had some medical training, but did not have a medical degree. “...[A] temperance reformer and pioneer in physical education, [he] was born near Auburn,... A product of the “Burned-Over District,” America’s most fertile ground for revivalism and reform during the Second Great Awakening (1800-1830), Dio Lewis absorbed revivalism’s lesson of individual improvement through self-discipline and applied it to social problems created or exacerbated by urbanization and industrialization. ... [He] published in 1861 a journal, the short-lived Gymnastic Monthly and Journal of Physical Culture, notable as the first American physical education periodical; and in the same year established the Boston Normal Institute for Physical Education, the nation’s first school to train teachers in physical education.” (ANB)

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