Where this practice came from
Shut Your Mouth
Health 11: Through the Nose ยท Episode 1 · the first of eight stories
George Catlin was an American painter who spent years travelling among Plains nations in the 1830s, producing hundreds of portraits.
Somewhere in that period he became convinced of something about breathing, and he wrote a book about it: The Breath of Life, published in 1861, which from 1870 was reissued under the title everyone now cites, Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life.
His observation was that the people he was travelling among breathed through the nose, that mothers actively closed their infants' mouths during sleep, and that the population appeared to him remarkably healthy and free of certain conditions common in the cities he had come from.
I want to handle this carefully, because it is the founding text of the modern nasal breathing movement and it needs both credit and caution.
The caution first. This is a nineteenth-century European-American traveller drawing sweeping conclusions about the health of peoples he observed for a limited period, in a genre saturated with romanticism and with assumptions we would now recognise as both wrong and harmful. His comparative health claims are anecdote, not data. And the framing of noble health contrasted against civilised decline is a very old rhetorical move that should always prompt suspicion, because it is usually doing something other than reporting.
The credit. The specific observation, that these were nose breathers and that this was culturally reinforced from infancy, appears to be accurate as an observation, and the underlying physiological point turned out to be sound. The nose does things the mouth does not. Catlin had no way of knowing what, and he was right that it mattered.
That is the pattern for this entire season and it arrives in episode one: a correct observation, an unsupportable set of surrounding claims, and a title that promises more than the technique delivers.
And what the nose actually does is worth the next episode, because it is genuinely more interesting than the folklore.
Next episode: the organ you breathe through.
Wren
The record says this much; the scenes between are imagined. The rest of the season, and the sourcing behind it, runs a few times a week at Wren. One page for the whole practice: /practice/.