Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages Part 23

'----Immediately, a place Before his eyes appeared; and, noisome, dark, A lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased; all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.'

"The fable of Prometheus, too, is explained in a manner somewhat similar. Before the time of Prometheus, according to Hesiod, mankind were exempt from suffering; they enjoyed a vigorous youth; and death, when at length it came, approached like sleep, and gently closed the eyes. Prometheus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire to culinary purposes. From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease. It consumed his being in every shape of its loathsome and infinite variety, inducing the soul-quelling sinkings of premature and violent death. All vice arose from the ruin of healthful innocence.

"Man, and the animals which he has infected with his society, or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased. The wild hog, the bison, and the wolf are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably die, either from external violence or natural old age. But the domestic hog, the sheep, the cow, and the dog are subject to an incredible number of distempers, and, like the corrupters of their nature, have physicians, who thrive upon their miseries.

"The supereminence of man is like Satan's supereminence of pain,--and the majority of his species, doomed to penury, disease, and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event, that, by enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow animals. But the steps that have been taken are irrevocable.

"The whole of human science is comprised in one question: How can the advantages of intellect and civilization be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life? How can we take the benefits and reject the evils of the system, which is now interwoven with our being?

I believe that _abstinence from animal food and spirituous liquors would, in a great measure, capacitate us for the solution of this important question_.

"It is true, that mental and bodily derangement is attributable in part to other deviations from rect.i.tude and nature than those which concern diet. The mistakes cherished by society respecting the connection of the s.e.xes, whence the misery and diseases of celibacy, unenjoying prost.i.tution, and the premature arrival of p.u.b.erty, necessarily spring; the putrid atmosphere of crowded cities; the exhalations of chemical processes: the m.u.f.fling of our bodies in superfluous apparel; the absurd treatment of infants; all these, and innumerable other causes, contribute their mite to the ma.s.s of human evil.

"Comparative anatomy teaches us that man resembles frugiverous animals in every thing, and carnivorous in nothing; he has neither claws wherewith to seize his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth to tear the living fibre. A mandarin of the first cla.s.s, with nails two inches long, would probably find them, alone, inefficient to hold even a hare. It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparations that it is rendered susceptible of mastication and digestion, and that the sight of its b.l.o.o.d.y juices does not excite intolerable loathing, horror, and disgust. Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and, plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say, Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent.

"Young children evidently prefer pastry, oranges, apples, and other fruit, to the flesh of animals, until, by the gradual depravation of the digestive organs, the free use of vegetables has, for a time, produced serious inconveniences. _For a time_, I say, since there never was an instance wherein a change from spirituous liquors and animal food to vegetables and pure water has failed ultimately to invigorate the body, by rendering its juices bland and consentaneous, and to restore to the mind that cheerfulness and elasticity which not one in fifty possesses on the present system. A love of strong liquor is also with difficulty taught to infants. Almost every one remembers the wry faces which the first gla.s.s of port produced. Unsophisticated instinct is invariably unerring; but to decide on the fitness of animal food from the perverted appet.i.tes which its constrained adoption produces, is to make the criminal a judge in his own cause; it is even worse--it is appealing to the infatuated drunkard in a question of the salubrity of brandy.

"Except in children, however, there remain no traces of that instinct which determines, in all other animals, what aliment is natural or otherwise; and so perfectly obliterated are they in the reasoning adults of our species, that it has become necessary to urge considerations drawn from comparative anatomy to prove that we are naturally frugiverous.

"Crime is madness. Madness is disease. Whenever the cause of disease shall be discovered, the root, from which all vice and misery have so long overshadowed the globe, will be bare to the axe. All the exertions of man, from that moment, may be considered as tending to the clear profit of his species. No sane mind, in a sane body, resolves upon a crime. It is a man of violent pa.s.sions, blood-shot eyes, and swollen veins, that alone can grasp the knife of murder. The system of a simple diet is not a reform of legislation, while the furious pa.s.sions and evil propensities of the human heart, in which it had its origin, are una.s.suaged. It strikes at the root of all evil, and is an experiment which may be tried with success, not alone by nations, but by small societies, families, and even individuals. In no case has a return to a vegetable diet produced the slightest injury; in most it has been attended with changes undeniably beneficial.

"Should ever a physician be born with the genius of Locke, he might trace all bodily and mental derangements to our unnatural habits, as clearly as that philosopher has traced all knowledge to sensation. What prolific sources of disease are not those mineral and vegetable poisons, that have been introduced for its extirpation! How many thousands have become murderers and robbers, bigots and domestic tyrants, dissolute and abandoned adventurers, from the use of fermented liquors, who, had they slaked their thirst only with pure water, would have lived but to diffuse the happiness of their own unperverted feelings! How many groundless opinions and absurd inst.i.tutions have not received a general sanction from the sottishness and intemperance of individuals!

"Who will a.s.sert that, had the populace of Paris satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature, they would have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre? Could a set of men, whose pa.s.sions were not perverted by unnatural stimuli, look with coolness on an _auto da fe_? Is it to be believed that a being of gentle feelings, rising from his meal of roots, would take delight in sports of blood?

"Was Nero a man of temperate life? Could you read calm health in his cheek, flushed with ungovernable propensities of hatred for the human race? Did Muley Ismail's pulse beat evenly? was his skin transparent?

did his eyes beam with healthfulness, and its invariable concomitants, cheerfulness and benignity?

"Though history has decided none of these questions, a child could not hesitate to answer in the negative. Surely the bile-suffused cheek of Bonaparte, his wrinkled brow, and yellow eye, the ceaseless inquietude of his nervous system, speak no less plainly the character of his unresting ambition than his murders and his victories. It is impossible, had Bonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders, that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons.

"The desire of tyranny could scarcely be excited in the individual; the power to tyrannize would certainly not be delegated by a society neither frenzied by inebriation nor rendered impotent and irrational by disease.

Pregnant, indeed, with inexhaustible calamity is the renunciation of instinct, as it concerns our physical nature. Arithmetic cannot enumerate, nor reason perhaps suspect, the mult.i.tudinous sources of disease in civilized life. Even common water, that apparently innoxious _pabulum_, when corrupted by the filth of populous cities, is a deadly and insidious destroyer.

"There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried. Debility is gradually converted into strength, disease into healthfulness; madness, in all its hideous variety, from the ravings of the fettered maniac, to the unaccountable irrationalities of ill-temper, that make a h.e.l.l of domestic life, into a calm and considerate evenness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge of the future moral reformation of society.

"On a natural system of diet, old age would be our last and our only malady; the term of our existence would be protracted; we should enjoy life, and no longer preclude others from the enjoyment of it; all sensational delights would be infinitely more exquisite and perfect; the very sense of being would then be a continued pleasure, such as we now feel it in some few and favored moments of our youth.

"By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system. Reasoning is surely superfluous on a subject whose merits an experience of six months should set forever at rest.

"But it is only among the enlightened and benevolent that so great a sacrifice of appet.i.te and prejudice can be expected, even though its ultimate excellence should not admit of dispute. It is found easier by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments, by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen. The vulgar of all ranks are invariably sensual and indocile; yet I cannot but feel myself persuaded, that when the benefits of vegetable diet are mathematically proved--when it is as clear, that those who live naturally are exempt from premature death, as that nine is not one, the most sottish of mankind will feel a preference toward a long and tranquil, contrasted with a short and painful life.

"On the average, out of sixty persons, four die in three years. Hopes are entertained, that in April, 1814,[20] a statement will be given that sixty persons, all having lived more than three years on vegetables and pure water, are then in _perfect health_. More than two years have now elapsed; _not one of them has died_; no such example will be found in any sixty persons taken at random.

"When these proofs come fairly before the world, and are clearly seen by all who understand arithmetic, it is scarcely possible that abstinence from aliments demonstrably pernicious should not become universal.

"In proportion to the number of proselytes, so will be the weight of evidence; and when a thousand persons can be produced, living on vegetables and distilled water, who have to dread no disease but old age, the world will be compelled to regard animal flesh and fermented liquors as slow but certain poisons.

"The change which would be produced by simple habits on political economy, is sufficiently remarkable. The monopolizing eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his const.i.tution by devouring an acre at a meal, and many loaves of bread would cease to contribute to gout, madness, and apoplexy, in the shape of a pint of porter, or a dram of gin, when appeasing the long-protracted famine of the hard-working peasant's hungry babes.

"The quant.i.ty of nutritious vegetable matter, consumed in fattening the carca.s.s of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance, undepraving indeed, and incapable of generating disease, if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth. The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation. It is only the wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesh, and they pay for the greater license of the privilege, by subjection to supernumerary diseases.

"Again--the spirit of the nation that should take the lead in this great reform would insensibly become agricultural; commerce, with its vices, selfishness, and corruption, would gradually decline; more natural habits would produce gentler manners, and the excessive complication of political relations would be so far simplified that every individual might feel and understand why he loved his country, and took a personal interest in its welfare.

"On a natural system of diet, we should require no spices from India; no wines from Portugal, Spain, France, or Madeira; none of those mult.i.tudinous articles of luxury, for which every corner of the globe is rifled, and which are the cause of so much individual rivals.h.i.+p, and such calamitous and sanguinary national disputes.

"Let it ever be remembered, that it is the direct influence of excess of commerce to make the interval between the rich and the poor wider and more unconquerable. Let it be remembered, that it is a foe to every thing of real worth and excellence in the human character. The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth, is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarce capable of cure. Is it impossible to realize a state of society, where all the energies of man shall be directed to the production of his solid happiness?

"None must be intrusted with power (and money is the completest species of power), who do not stand pledged to use it exclusively for the general benefit. But the use of animal flesh and fermented liquors, directly militates with this equality of the rights of man. The peasant cannot gratify these fas.h.i.+onable cravings without leaving his family to starve. Without disease and war, those sweeping curtailers of population, pasturage would include a waste too great to be afforded.

The labor requisite to support a family is far lighter than is usually supposed. The peasantry work, not only for themselves, but for the aristocracy, the army, and the manufacturers.

"The advantage of a reform in diet is obviously greater than that of any other. It strikes at the root of the evil. To remedy the abuses of legislation, before we annihilate the propensities by which they are produced, is to suppose that by taking away the effect, the cause will cease to operate.

"But the efficacy of this system depends entirely on the proselytism of individuals, and grounds its merits, as a benefit to the community, upon the total change of the dietetic habits in its members. It proceeds securely from a number of particular cases to one that is universal, and has this advantage over the contrary mode, that one error does not invalidate all that has gone before.

"Let not too much, however, be expected from this system. The healthiest among us is not exempt from hereditary disease. The most symmetrical, athletic, and long-lived is a being inexpressibly inferior to what he would have been had not the unnatural habits of his ancestors acc.u.mulated for him a certain portion of malady and deformity. In the most perfect specimen of civilized man, something is still found wanting by the physiological critic. Can a return to nature, then, instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking root in the silence of innumerable ages? Indubitably not. All that I contend for is, that from the moment of relinquis.h.i.+ng all unnatural habits, no new disease is generated; and that the predisposition to hereditary maladies gradually perishes for want of its accustomed supply. In cases of consumption, cancer, gout, asthma, and scrofula, such is the invariable tendency of a diet of vegetables and pure water.

"Those who may be induced by these remarks to give the vegetable system a fair trial, should, in the first place, date the commencement of their practice from the moment of their conviction. All depends upon breaking through a pernicious habit resolutely and at once. Dr. Trotter a.s.serts, that no drunkard was ever reformed by gradually relinquis.h.i.+ng his dram.

Animal flesh, in its effects on the human stomach, is a.n.a.logous to a dram; it is similar to the kind, though differing in the degree of its operation. The proselyte to a pure diet must be warned to expect a temporary diminution of muscular strength. The subtraction of a powerful stimulus will suffice to account for this event. But it is only temporary, and is succeeded by an equable capability for exertion, far surpa.s.sing his former various and fluctuating strength.

"Above all, he will acquire an easiness of breathing, by which such exertion is performed, with a remarkable exemption from that painful and difficult panting now felt by almost every one, after hastily climbing an ordinary mountain. He will be equally capable of bodily exertion or mental application, after, as before his simple meal. He will feel none of the narcotic effects of ordinary diet. Irritability, the direct consequence of exhausting stimuli, would yield to the power of natural and tranquil impulses. He will no longer pine under the lethargy of _ennui_, that unconquerable weariness of life, more to be dreaded than death itself.

"He will no longer be incessantly occupied in blunting and destroying those organs from which he expects his gratification. The pleasures of taste to be derived from a dinner of potatoes, beans, peas, turnips, lettuce, with a dessert of apples, gooseberries, strawberries, currants, raspberries, and in winter, oranges, apples, and pears, is far greater than is supposed. Those who wait until they can eat this plain fare with the sauce of appet.i.te, will scarcely join with the hypocritical sensualist at a lord mayor's feast, who declaims against the pleasures of the table."

REV. EZEKIEL RICH.

This gentleman, once a teacher in Troy, N. H., now nearly seventy years of age, is a giant, both intellectually and physically, like Father Sewall, of Maine. The following is his testimony--speaking of what he calls his system:

"Such a system of living was formed by myself, irrespective of Graham or Alcott, or any other modern dietetic philosophers and reformers, although I agree with them in many things. It allows but little use of flesh, condiments, concentrated articles, complex cooking, or hot and stimulating drinks. On the other hand, it requires great use of milk, the different bread stuffs, fruits, esculent roots and pulse, all well, simply, and neatly cooked."

REV. JOHN WESLEY.

The habits of this distinguished individual, though often adverted to, are yet not sufficiently known. For the last half of his long life (eighty-eight years) he was a thorough going vegetarian. He also testifies that for three or four successive years he lived entirely on potatoes; and during that whole time he never relaxed his arduous ministerial labors, nor ever enjoyed better health.

LAMARTINE.

Lamartine was educated a vegetarian of the strictest sort--an education which certainly did not prevent his possessing as fine a physical frame as can be found in the French republic. Of his mental and moral characteristics it is needless that I should speak. True it is that Lamartine ate flesh and fish at one period of his life; but we have the authority of Douglas Jerrold's London Journal for a.s.suring our readers that he is again a vegetarian.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Some, however, represent the great apostle to have been a rigid vegetable eater. On this point I have no settled opinion.

[18] It may be found at full length at page 233 of the 6th volume of the Library of Health.

[19] Instances, he says, are not rare (but this I doubt), of two hundred children born to a man by his different wives, in some parts of the interior of Africa.

[20] A date but little later than that of the work whence this article is extracted.