This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we're back with Our American Stories and with author Margaret Goroff, telling the story of the bicycle and America.

When we left off, she just told us about the bicycle boom in the 1890s, when a technological

innovation, the lowering of the bicycle, thanks to the chain, allowed more people, including

women, to access writing and increase mobility.

Back to Margaret with the rest of the story.

So in Europe, there had been a move towards more scientific understanding of medicine and health. In this country, people thought of doctors as

kind of in charge of the whole person. They're not just their physical well-being, but sort of

their moral well-being and how that could play into their health. There was a thought that

each person had their own individual chemistry.

Like, just because something was good for one person didn't mean it would be good for everybody.

Each person had to be individually analyzed by their doctor who knew them well.

And one of the things that American doctors were saying about the bicycle

was that you shouldn't ride it or you shouldn't override it

because you only had so much energy in your life,

like a battery that you can't recharge,

and you had to conserve that. And you couldn't, you couldn't be

going out exercising willy-nilly because you would just wear yourself out and then you'd die.

And there were certain things about American life that supported this, like the clothes that

women wore middle-class women at the time were expected to wear these very restrictive

corsets that they needed in part because the weight of their clothes and the weight of their skirts

was so much that they needed this infrastructure underneath that would distribute the weight.

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