An article in The New Yorker this week about the century-long drive to bring universal health care to American citizens opens with this:

“At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without compulsory health insurance,” the Yale economist Irving Fisher said in a speech in December. December of 1916, that is. More than nine decades ago, Fisher thought that universal health coverage was just around the corner. “Within another six months, it will be a burning question,” he predicted. Oh, well. What’s a century, give or take?

Fisher, an earlier driver for universal health care, was also the author of How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science (mentioned in the New Yorker piece, currently available in a new edition only from Cosimo Classics.

Fisher’s interest in public health was prompted by a bout with tuberculosis — a major menace to public health at the time — after which he wrote this book, published in 1915 under the auspices of the Life Extension Institute. In it, Fisher presents information on deep breathing, the kinds and quantities of food to consume, poisons, the importance of being active, rules of general hygiene, and more. Specific tip cover overweight or underweight, alcohol consumption, posture, tobacco use — and even how to avoid colds.

Irving Fisher earned the first Ph.D. in economics awarded by Yale University, where he also taught political economy. He was an accomplished mathematician and an engaging and talented writer on even the most technical of subjects whose investigations ranged beyond economics to encompass astronomy, health and hygiene, mechanics, philosophy, poetry, science, and myriad public policy issues. He died in 1947, and he’d probably be appalled to discover that affordable health care for all — which every industrialized nation in the world except the U.S. extends to all its citizens, at lower cost and with better results than the U.S. manages — continues to be withheld from Americans.