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The magic of the nose, and its healing powers, wasn’t lost on the ancients.
Around 1500 BCE, the Ebers Papyrus, one of the oldest medical texts ever discovered, offered a description of how nostrils were supposed to feed air to the heart and lungs, not the mouth. A thousand years later, Genesis 2:7 described how “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” A Chinese Taoist text from the eighth century AD noted that the nose was the “heavenly door,” and that breath must be taken in through it. “Never do otherwise,” the text warned, “for breath would be in danger and illness would set in.”
But it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the Western population ever considered the glories of nasal breathing. It happened thanks to an adventurous artist and researcher named George Catlin.
By 1830, Catlin had left what he called a “dry and tedious” job as a lawyer to become a portrait painter for Philadelphia’s high society. He became well-known for his depictions of governors and aristocrats, but all the pomp and pretention of polite society did not impress him. Although his health was failing, Catlin yearned to be far away in nature, to capture rawer and more real depictions of humanity. He packed a gun, several canvases, a few paintbrushes, and headed west. Catlin would spend the next six years traveling thousands of miles throughout the Great Plains, covering more distance than Lewis and Clark to document the lives of 50 Native American tribes.
He went up the Missouri to live with the Lakota Sioux. He met with the Pawnee, Omaha, Cheyenne, and Blackfeet. Along the banks of the Upper Missouri, he happened upon the civilization of the Mandan, a mysterious tribe whose members stood six feet tall and lived in bubble-shaped houses. Many had luminous blue eyes and snow-white hair.
Catlin realized that nobody really knew about the Mandan, or other Plains tribes, because no one of European descent had bothered to spend time talking to them, researching them, living with them, and learning about their beliefs and traditions.
“I am traveling this country, as I have before said, not to advance or to prove theories, but to see all I am able to see and to tell it in the simplest and most intelligible manner I can to the world, for their own conclusions,” Catlin wrote. He would paint some 600 portraits and take hundreds of pages of notes, forming what famed author Peter Matthiessen would call “the first, last, and only complete record ever made of the Plains Indians at the height of their splendid culture.”
The tribes varied region by region, with different customs, traditions, and diets. Some, like the Mandan, ate only buffalo flesh and maize, while others lived on venison and water, and still others harvested plants and flowers. The tribes looked different, too, with varying hair colors, facial features, and skin tones.
And yet Catlin marveled at the fact that all 50 tribes seemed to share the same superhuman physical characteristics. In some groups, such as the Crow and the Osage, Catlin wrote there were few men, “at their full growth, who are less than six feet in stature, and very many of them six and a half, and others seven feet.” They all seemed to share a Herculean make of broad shoulders and barrel chests. The women were nearly as tall and just as striking.
Having never seen a dentist or doctor, the tribal people had teeth that were perfectly straight—“as regular as the keys of a piano,” Catlin noted. Nobody seemed to get sick, and deformities and other chronic health problems appeared rare or nonexistent. The tribes attributed their vigorous health to a medicine, what Catlin called the “great secret of life.” The secret was breathing.
The Native Americans explained to Catlin that breath inhaled through the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress and disease. On the other hand, breath inhaled through the nose kept the body strong, made the face beautiful, and prevented disease. “The air which enters the lungs is as different from that which enters the nostrils as distilled water is different from the water in an ordinary cistern or a frog-pond,” he wrote.
Healthy nasal breathing started at birth. Mothers in all these tribes followed the same practices, carefully closing the baby’s lips with their fingers after each feeding. At night, they’d stand over sleeping infants and gently pinch mouths shut if they opened. Some Plains tribes strapped infants to a straight board and placed a pillow beneath their heads, creating a posture that made it much harder to breathe through the mouth. During winter, infants would be wrapped in light clothing and then held at arm’s length on warmer days so they’d be less prone to get too hot and begin panting.
All these methods trained children to breathe through their noses, all day, every day. It was a habit they would carry with them the rest of their lives. Catlin described how adult tribal members would even resist smiling with an open mouth, fearing some noxious air might get in. This practice was as “old and unchangeable as their hills,” he wrote, and it was shared universally throughout the tribes for millennia.
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Twenty years after Catlin explored the West, he set off again, at age 56, to live with indigenous cultures in the Andes, Argentina, and Brazil. He wanted to know if “medicinal” breathing practices extended beyond the Plains. They did. Every tribe Catlin visited over the next several years—dozens of them—shared the same breathing habits. It was no coincidence, he reported, that they also shared the same vigorous health, perfect teeth, and forward-growing facial structure. He wrote about his experiences in The Breath of Life, published in 1862. The book was devoted solely to documenting the wonders of nasal breathing and the hazards of mouthbreathing.
Catlin was not only a chronicler of breathing methods; he was a practitioner. Nasal breathing saved his life.
As a boy, Catlin snored and was wracked with one respiratory problem after another. By the time he reached his 30s and first went out West, these problems had become so severe that he’d sometimes spit up blood. His friends were convinced he had lung disease. Every night Catlin feared he would die.
“I became fully convinced of the danger of the habit [mouthbreathing], and resolved to overcome it,” he wrote. Through “sternness of resolution and perseverance,” Catlin forced his mouth closed while he slept and always breathed through his nose during waking hours. Soon, there were no more aches, pains, or bleeding. By his mid-30s, Catlin reported feeling healthier and stronger than at any other time in his life. “I at length completely conquered an insidious enemy that was nightly attacking me in my helpless position, and evidently fast hurrying me to the grave,” he wrote.
George Catlin would live to be 76, about double the average life expectancy at the time. He credited his longevity to the “great secret of life”: to always breathe through the nose.
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It’s the third night of the nasal breathing phase of the experiment, and I’m sitting up in bed reading, taking slow and easy breaths through my nose. I’m not breathing this way out of some “constant adult conviction,” as Catlin wrote. I’m doing it because my lips are taped shut.