The Natural Method its author considers as a kind of supplement to his last book, containing “the practical inferences, and the conclusions drawn from [its principles], in particular cases and diseases, confirmed by forty years’ experience and observation.” It is the most practical of all his works, and is full of valuable observations. Very just and useful is his rebuke of that sort of John-Bullism which affects to hold “good living” not only as harmless but even as a sort of merit—
“How it may be in other countries and religions I will not say, but among us good Protestants, abstinence, temperance, and moderation (at least in eating), are so far from being thought a virtue, and their contrary a vice, that it would seem that not eating the fattest and most delicious, and to the top, were the only vice and disease known among us—against which our parents, relatives, friends, and physicians exclaim with great vehemence and zeal. And yet, if we consider the matter attentively we shall find there is no such danger in abstinence as we imagine, but, on the contrary, the greatest abstinence and moderation nature and its external laws will suffer us to go into and practise for any time, will neither endanger our health, nor weaken our just thinking, be it ever so unlimited or unrestrained.... And it is a wise providence that Lent time falls out at that season which, if kept according to its original intention, in seeds and vegetables well dressed and not in rich high-dressed fish, would go a great way to preserve the health of the people in general, as well as dispose them to seriousness and reflection—so true it is that ‘godliness has the promise of this life, and of that which is to come,’ and it is very observable that in all civil and established religious worships hitherto known among polished nations Lents, days of abstinence, seasons of fasting and bringing down the brutal part of the rational being, have had a large share, and been reckoned an indispensable part of their worship and duty, except among a wrong-headed part of our Reformation, where it has been despised and ridiculed into a total neglect. And yet it seems not only natural and convenient for health, but strongly commended both in the Old and New Testament, and might allow time and proper disposition for more serious and weighty purposes. And this ‘Lent,’ or times of abstinence, is one reason of the cheerfulness or serenity of some Roman Catholic or Southern countries, which would be still more healthy and long-lived were it not for their excessive use of aromatics and opiates, which are the worst kind of dry drams, and the cause of their unnatural and unbridled lechery and shortness of life.”
Denouncing the general practice of the Profession of encouraging their patients in indulging vitiated habits and tastes, he reminds them:—
“That such physicians do not consider that they are accountable to the community, to their patients, to their conscience, and to their Maker, for every hour and moment they shorten and cut off their patients’ lives by their immoral and murderous indulgence: and the patients do not duly ponder that suicide (which this is in effect) is the most mortal and irremissible of all sins, and neither have sufficiently weighed the possibility that the patient, if not quickly cut off by both these preposterous means, may linger out miserably, and be twenty or thirty years a-dying, under these heart and wheel-breaking miseries thus exasperated; whereas, by the methods I propose, if they obtain not in time a perfect cure, yet they certainly lessen their pain, lengthen their days, and continue under the benign influence of ‘the Sun of Righteousness, who has healing in His wings,’ and, at worst, soften and lighten the anguish of their dissolution, as far as the nature of things will admit.”
Not the least useful and instructive portions of his treatise are his references to the proper regimen for mental diseases and disordered brains, which, he reasonably infers, are best treated by the adoption of a light and pure dietary. He despairs, however, of the general recognition, or at least adoption, of so rational a method by the “faculty” or the public at large,
“Who do not consider that nine parts in ten of the whole mass of mankind are necessarily confined to this diet (of farinacea, fruits, &c.), or pretty nearly to it, and yet live with the use of their senses, limbs, and faculties, without diseases or with but few, and those from accidents or epidemical causes; and that there have been nations, and now are numbers of tribes, who voluntarily confine themselves to vegetables only, ... and that there are whole villages in this kingdom whose inhabitants scarce eat animal food or drink fermented liquors a dozen times a year.”
In regard to all nervous and brain diseases, he insists that the reformed diet would
“Greatly alleviate and render tolerable original distempers derived from diseased parents, and that it is absolutely necessary for the deep-thinking part of mankind, who would preserve their faculties ripe and pregnant to a green old age and to the last dregs of life; and that it is the true and real antidote and preservative from wrong-headedness, irregular and disorderly intellect and functions, from loss of the rational faculties, memory, and senses, as far as the ends of Providence and the condition of mortality will allow.”—(Nat. Method, page 90.)