Sometime in her eighties, my Aunt Hildy, who passed on at 94 or so, handed me a book, “Your Body’s Many Cries for Water”, by an Iranian physician with a totally unpronounceable name, Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, M.D. She told me it had changed her life. Dr. B. attributed virtually all chronic illnesses, premature death, and susceptibility to infections to the state of chronic dehydration we had allowed ourselves to endure by our insufficient intake of water.

Because Dr. B. also felt that water had curative properties, his work was literally shredded by conventional physicians here in the U.S., where he was regarded as a “crank” and a “quack”. The Wikipedia entry is especially brutal since it’s written by Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch, which (if you bother to read it) seems to have a special loathing for Dr. B. because of his claims that good hydration promotes longevity.

And so the years pass. Dr. B. dies at 74, although his books (he wrote seven more) all remain in print, apparently being read by the well-hydrated, healthy, and generally ignored by the desiccated conventional physicians.