“My most ardent wish was to attempt the relief of cases of cancer. This object I have steadily pursued (from the year 1803) to the present day. The case—the particulars of which I briefly mentioned to you in my former communication—has hitherto succeeded so perfectly that I should myself suspect an error in the diagnosis, if it were not for the strongly-marked constitutional symptoms, which are such as, in my mind, put it out of doubt. There does not now remain what I expected, and what I have called a nucleus, for the resolution is complete. Now, this is contrary to most of my former observations, and would furnish, as I have said, some ground of suspicion. But still it is not wholly unsupported by corroborative facts. I have observed, particularly in one case, that the whole extreme edge of a schirrous tumour has been restored, whilst the portion has remained unchanged; not, indeed, speedily as in the former case, but after having used the diet for a very considerable time. Now, if a portion of a true schirrous tumour can be resolved, there can be no reason why a resolution of the whole—taken very early and under favourable circumstances—shall be deemed impossible. The truth is, that at present we are not advanced enough to form general conclusions, but ought to content ourselves with accumulating facts for the use of our successors.”

If the experience of the benefits of a reasonable living in the cases of his patients was thus satisfactory, he himself afforded, in his own person, perhaps the best testimony to its revivifying and invigorating qualities. One of his visitors gives his impressions of the now famous doctor (a title, in the present instance, of real meaning) as follow: “Agreeably to your request, I submit to your perusal a short account of the friendly interview I had with Dr. Lambe in London. I first called on him in February. I found him to be very gentlemanly in manners and venerable in appearance. He is rather taller than the middle height. His hair is perfectly white, for he is now seventy-two years of age. He told me he had been on the vegetable diet thirty-one years, and that his health was better now than at forty, when he commenced his present system of living. He considers himself as likely to live thirty years longer as to have lived to his present age.... Although he is seventy-two years of age he walks into town, a distance of three miles from his residence, every morning, and back at night. Dr. Lambe, I am told, has spent large sums of money in making experiments and publishing their results to the world.” In his earlier life he had been conspicuously thin and attenuated. In later years he seems to have acquired even a certain amount of robustness, and he is described as being active and strong at an advanced age. Some instances of extraordinary energy and endurance have been put on record by his family; and his feats of pedestrianism, when he was verging on his eightieth year, are, we imagine, rarely to be paralleled.

His hope of attaining the age of one hundred years, unhappily, was not to be fulfilled. “Our bodies,” his biographer justly remarks, “are but machines adapted to perform a definite amount of work, and Dr. Lambe’s originally weak constitution had been severely tried by sickness and wrong diet during the first forty years of his life. At the age of eighty his strength began to fail, but his grandson writes, ‘up to a very short time before his death there were no outward signs of ill-health, only the marks of old age.’”[221] Existence had its enjoyment for him up to almost the last days, and his intellectual powers remained to the end. He calmly expired in his eighty-third year.

Of contemporary and posthumous eulogies of his personal, as well as scientific, worth, the following may suffice: “A man of learning, a man of science, a man of genius, a man of distinguished integrity and honour.” Such is the testimony of his friend Dr. Parr, as quoted by Samuel Johnson. In the Anniversary Harveian Oration before the College of Physicians, by Dr. Francis Hawkins, in the year 1848, the representative of the Faculty thus recalls his memory: “Nor can I pass over in silence the loss we have sustained in Dr. William Lambe—an excellent chemist, a learned man, and a skilful physician. His manners were simple, unreserved, and most modest. His life was pure. Farewell, therefore, gentle spirit, than whom no one more pure and innocent has passed away!”

XXXIX.
NEWTON. 1770–1825.

JOHN FRANK NEWTON, the friend and associate of Dr. Lambe, Shelley, and the little band who met at the house of the former to share his vegetarian repasts, appears to have been one of the earliest converts of Dr. Lambe, to whom he dedicated his Return to Nature, in gratitude for the recovery of his health through the adoption of the reformed regimen.

He published his little work, as he informs us in his preface, to impart to others the benefits which he himself had experienced; and especially to make known to the heads of households the fact that his whole family of himself, wife, and four children under nine years of age, with their nurse, had been living, at the date of his publication, for two years upon a non-flesh diet, during which time the apothecary’s bill, he tells us, had amounted to the sum of sixpence; and that charge had been incurred by himself.

The ever-memorable meetings of the reformers at the house of Newton, where Shelley was a constant guest, have been thus recorded by one of the biographers of the great poet:—“Shelley was intimate with the Newton family, and was converted by them in 1813, and he began then a strict vegetable diet. His intimate association with the amiable and accomplished votaries of a Return to Nature was perhaps the most pleasing portion of his poetical, philosophical, and lovely life.... For some years I was in the thick of it; for I lived much with a select and most estimable society of persons (the Newtons), who had ‘returned to Nature,’ and I heard much discussion on the topic of vegetable diet. Certainly their vegetable dinners were delightful, elegant, and excellent repasts; flesh, fowl, fish, and ‘game’ never appeared—nor eggs nor butter bodily, but the two latter were admitted into cookery, but as sparingly as possible, and under protest, as not approved of and soon to be dispensed with. We had soups in great variety, that seemed the more delicate from the absence of flesh-meat.

“There were vegetables of every kind, plainly stewed or scientifically disguised. Puddings, tarts, confections and sweets abounded. Cheese was excluded. Milk and cream might not be taken unreservedly, but they were allowed in puddings, and sparingly in tea. Fruits of every kind were welcomed. We luxuriated in tea and coffee, and sought variety occasionally in cocoa and chocolate. Bread and butter, and buttered toast were eschewed; but bread, cakes, and plain seed-cakes were liberally divided among the faithful.”[222]

The cause of the publication of his book Newton thus states:—