‘Vitalogy’: How a Victorian health encyclopedia inspired a classic Pearl Jam album
When Pearl Jam released their third studio album, Vitalogy, in 1994, fans were struck not only by the jagged urgency of the music but also by the unusual packaging of the product.
Initially released on vinyl, a very against-the-grain concept for the mid-1990s, the CD version of Vitalogy eventually arrived not in the traditional plastic jewel case of the era, but tucked into a miniature cardboard book, with sepia-toned lettering and textured, antique design flourishes. If you owned it, you might also recall how this unorthodox case measured about a half-inch taller than the industry standard, making it the oddball misfit in thousands of otherwise impeccably organised CD storage towers.
The title itself, “Vitalogy”, seemed predictably cryptic and pretentious, in line with a band that had already named a record after the jersey number of an obscure basketball player (Ten = Mookie Blaylock). What many fans didn’t realise is that both the album’s name and its visual aesthetic didn’t come from the mind of Eddie Vedder, nor anyone at the Epic Records marketing department. Instead, they were directly lifted from a very real book first published almost a century earlier: a massive “encyclopedia of health and home” called Vitalogy.
This hefty, leather-bound tome was first published in 1899 and compiled the writings and supposedly science-backed musings of doctors EH Ruddock and George P Wood. It was reissued numerous times and expanded by others well into the 1930s, with some editions tallying up more than 1,000 pages. Vitalogy made every effort to live up to its claims as a catch-all guide for personal health, hygiene, morality, and medical treatments in an age when quack medicine was still king and access to licensed doctors and hospitals was limited.
Inside, readers found numerous fantastic and absolutely bizarre fucking illustrations, along with everything from advice on digestion and sleep to discussions of sexuality, alcohol, childbirth, and mental illness. Some entries reflected cutting-edge medical thinking of the day, while others leaned toward superstition and moral judgment. “Swearing weakens every expression to which it is added,” one section warned. “It is simply and purely a habit caught by contagion, like smallpox, and cultivated by practice till it deforms the person habituated to it and injures his chances in every career in life from the humblest to the highest.”
The authoritative voice of the book instilled trust in a reader in part by honing in on their fears—not a hard thing to do during a time when the average life expectancy in the US was still below 50 years. Not unlike the unlicensed, online medical “experts” of today, it also suggested that “the science of health is no longer the exclusive possession of a profession, but is made an open book for those who have the wisdom to learn that which more nearly than anything else concerns their lease of life, the extent to which it is to run, and their capacity for its best enjoyment.”
According to Pearl Jam lore, Eddie Vedder was already planning to call the band’s third album Life, a good indication of an expanding sense of self-importance, but when he stumbled upon a dusty old copy of Vitalogy at a garage sale in 1994, he was freshly inspired. Buying the book and bringing it along to the studio, he found that the other guys in the band were equally amused, and the decision was made to adapt the book’s look directly into the art for the new record. Was the Vitalogy book actually in the public domain by this point? Probably, but it’s unlikely anybody spent too much time double-checking anyway.
Along with the snazzy antique cover, the album’s liner notes reproduced several illustrations and entries from the original book, including some ideas that at least loosely linked in with some of the themes of Vedder’s own songwriting, as well as his clothing preferences. “The wise man of old said: ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he’…. If you permit no thought of death and disease to enter your mind, you will accomplish nine-tenths of the battle to stave off these foes… Tight clothing must, of course, be absolutely discarded.”
As with most “found” art in the 1990s, the original content was recycled with a new, thick layer of irony on top. The Vitalogy book was not being endorsed to grunge kids for its long-forgotten brilliance as a guide to life. Instead, it was an artefact of man’s hubris in the face of his own mortality; a concept much more up Pearl Jam’s street. Huge amounts of advice in the book had become laughable by the mid-20th century, despite the absolute confidence with which the book communicated them.
Case in point: “An ordinary cold can be readily cured by soaking the feet in as hot mustard-water as can well be borne.” Or, for a cancerous carcinoma: “Mash a quantity of cranberries in a mortar, then spread on a cloth and apply to the cancer, and change the poultice three times a day.”
Today, original copies of the encyclopedia Vitalogy are collectors’ items, just like those original LP releases of the Pearl Jam record, as the connection to the band has only increased the book’s relative intrigue and mystique.
