[1] He left home at sixteen and throughout his career worked as an artist, importer, manager of the New Orleans Opera House and writer.

Fletcher suffered from dyspepsia and obesity in his later years, so he devised a system of chewing food to maximize digestion.

He lived in the Palazzo Saibante with his wife, Grace Fletcher, an amateur painter, who studied in Paris in the 1870s and was influenced by the Impressionists, and her daughter, Ivy.

Ivy, later to become a journalist at the Daily Express in the 1930s, was often a guinea pig for Horace's experiments, which she described in her unpublished memoirs "Remember Me".

The tests included: “deep-knee bending”, holding out arms horizontally for a length of time, and calf raises on an intricate machine.

If one was in good health and maintained proper nutrition then their excreta, or digestive "ash", as Fletcher called it, should be entirely "inoffensive".

The approach has only three steps: Although he acquired many followers, medical experts described Fletcher as a food faddist and promoter of quackery.

[14] Fletcher's extreme claims about chewing a mouthful of food up to one hundred times until it had no taste in order to avoid illness is not supported by scientific evidence.

[12] Physician Morris Fishbein noted that the result of Fletcher's system was a "thorough disturbance of the entire body and the development of intoxication and general disability.