“Because it appears certain, in general, that the body can be perfectly nourished by vegetables.
“Because all great changes of the constitution are more likely to be effected by alterations of diet and modes of life than by medicine.
“Because it holds out a source of hope and consolation to the patient in a disease in which medicine is known to be unavailing, and in which surgery affords no more than a temporary relief.”[217]
“The above opinion of Mr. Abernethy,” remarks an experienced authority upon the subject, “is most valuable, for he watched the case for three and a half years under Dr. Lambe’s regimen, which is directly opposed to the system of diet which he had advocated, before he met Dr. Lambe, in the first volume of his work on Constitutional Diseases, and from his rough honesty there is no doubt that had Dr. Abernethy lived to publish a second edition he would have corrected his mistake.” As it is, the candour by which so distinguished an authority was impelled to alter or modify opinions already put forth to the world, claims our respect as much as the too general want of it deserves censure.
XXXVIII.
LAMBE. 1765–1847.
ONE of the most distinguished of the hygeistic and scientific promoters of the reformed regimen, Dr. Lambe, occupies an eminent position in the medical literature of vegetarianism, and he divides with his predecessor, Dr. Cheyne, the honour of being the founder of scientific dietetics in this country.
His family had been settled some two hundred years in the county of Hereford, in which they possessed an estate that descended to Dr. William Lambe, and is now held by his grandson. He early gave promise of his future mental eminence. Head boy of the Hereford Grammar School, he proceeded, in due course, to St. John’s College, Cambridge. In 1786, being then in the twenty-first year of his age, he graduated as fourth wrangler of his year. As a matter of course, he soon was elected a Fellow of his college, where he continued to reside until his marriage in 1794. During this period of learned leisure he devoted his time to the study of medicine, and the MS. notes in the possession of his biographer, Mr. Hare, “prove the diligence with which he studied his profession, and there we see the origin of his enlarged views of the causes of disease, so much insisted on by these fathers of medicine, and so much neglected by modern physicians in their search for chemical remedies.” After his marriage he went to reside and practise in Warwick, where he was the intimate friend of Parr, the well-known Greek critic, and of Walter Savage Landor, who writes of him as “very communicative and good humoured. I had enough talk with Lambe to assure myself that he is no ordinary man.” It was to the discoveries of Dr. Lambe, and to his publications reporting the curative value of its mineral waters, that Leamington owed its fame and popularity; and Dr. Jefferson, in his address to the British Medical Association a few years ago, thus eulogises him:—
“It was not until the end of the last century that any really scientific research ever was recorded on this subject [impure water]. About this period Dr. Lambe was engaged in practice in Warwick. Somewhat eccentric in some of his practical views, Dr. Lambe was not the less a scientific man, an intelligent observer of nature, and an accomplished physician, and was, moreover, one of the most elegant medical writers of his day. The springs of the neighbouring village of Leamington did not escape his observation, and, having carefully studied and analysed the waters, he published an account of them, in 1797, in the fifth volume of the Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Manchester, a society embracing the respected names of Priestley, Dalton, Watt, and others, and not inferior, perhaps, to any contemporary association in Europe.”
Like many other seceders from orthodox dietetics both before and after him, Dr. Lambe found himself impelled to experiment in the non-flesh diet by ill-health. His bodily disorders, indeed, were so complicated and of such a nature, as to excite astonishment that not only he greatly mitigated their violence, but that also he survived to an advanced age. In an exceedingly minute and conscientious narrative of his own case in his Additional Reports (writing in the third person), he informs us, that having during several years—from his eighteenth year—suffered greatly and with constantly aggravated symptoms:—