Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages / Including a System of Vegetable Cookery

by William A. Alcott

Mr. G. McElroy, of Kentucky, spent several months of the most sickly season in the most unhealthy parts of Africa, in the year 1835, and yet enjoyed the best of health the whole time. While there and on his passage home, he abstained wholly from animal food, living on rice and other farinaceous vegetables and fruits.

In view of these facts and many others, Mr. Graham remarks: "Under a proper regimen our enterprising young men of New England may go to New Orleans or Liberia, or any where else they choose, and stay as long as they choose, and yet enjoy good health." And there is no doubt he is right.

But it is hardly worth while to cite single facts in proof of a point of this kind. There is abundant testimony to be had, going to show that a vegetable diet is a security against disease, especially against epidemics, whether in the form of a mere influenza or malignant fever. Nay, there is reason to believe that a person living according to all the Creator's laws, physical and moral, could hardly receive or communicate disease of any kind. How could a person in perfect health, and obeying to an iota all the laws of health—how could he contract disease? What would there be in his system which could furnish a nidus for its reception?

I am well aware that not a few people suppose the most healthy are as much exposed to disease as others, and that there are some who even suppose they are much more so. "Death delights in a shining mark," or something to this effect, is a maxim which has probably had its origin in the error to which I have adverted. To the same source may be traced the strange opinion that a fatal or malignant disease makes its first and most desperate attacks upon the healthy and the robust. The fact is—and this explains the whole riddle—those who are regarded, by the superficial and short-sighted in this matter, as the most healthy and robust, are usually persons whose unhealthy habits have already sown the seeds of disease; and nothing is wanting but the usual circumstances of epidemics to rouse them into action. More than all this, these strong-looking but inwardly-diseased persons are almost sure to die whenever disease does attack them, simply on account of the previous abuses of their constitutions.

During the prevalence of the cholera in New York, about the year 1832, all the Grahamites, as they were called, who had for some time abstained from animal food—and their number was quite respectable—and who persevered in it, either wholly escaped the disease, or had it very lightly; and this, too, notwithstanding a large proportion of them were very much exposed to its attacks, living in the parts of the city where it most prevailed, or in families where others were dying almost daily. This could not be the result of mere accident; it is morally impossible.

But flesh-eaters—admitting the flesh were wholesome—are not only much more liable to contract disease, but if they contract it, to suffer more severely than others. There is yet another important consideration which belongs to the medical argument. Animal food is much more liable than vegetable food, to those changes or conditions which we call poisonous, and which are always, in a greater or less degree, the sources of disease; it is also more liable to poisonous mixtures or adulterations.

It is true, that in the present state of the arts, and of agriculture and civic life generally, vegetables themselves are sometimes the sources of disease. I refer not to the spurred rye and other substances, which occasionally find their way into our fields and get mixed with our grains, etc., and which are known to be very active poisons,—so much as to the acrid or otherwise improper juices which are formed by forced vegetation, especially about cities, whether by means of hot-beds, green-houses, or new, strong, or highly-concentrated manures. I refer also to the crude, unripe, and imperfect fruits and other things with which our markets are filed now-a-days; and especially to decaying fruits and vegetables. But I cannot enlarge; a volume would be too little to do this part of the subject justice. Nothing is more wanted than light on this subject, and a consequent reform in our fashionable agriculture and horticulture.

And yet, although I admit, most cheerfully, the danger we are in of contracting disease by using diseased vegetables, the danger is neither so frequent nor so imminent, in proportion to the quantity of it consumed, as from animal food. Let us briefly take a view of the facts.

Milk, in its nature, approaches nearest to the line of the vegetable kingdom, and is therefore, in my view, the least objectionable form of animal food. I am even ready to admit that for persons affected with certain forms of chronic disease, and for all children, milk is excellent. And yet, excellent as it is, it is very liable to be injurious. We are told, by the most respectable medical men of France, that all the cows about Paris have tubercles (the seeds or beginning of consumption) in their lungs which is probably owing to the unnatural state in which they are kept, as regards the kind, and quantity, and hours of receiving their food; and especially as regards air, exercise, and water. Cows cannot be healthy, nor any other domestic animals, any more than men, when long subjected to the unnatural and unhealthy influences of bad air, want of exercise, etc. Hence, then, most of our cows about our towns and cities must be diseased, in a greater or less degree—if not with consumption, with something else. And of course their milk must be diseased—not, perhaps, as much as their blood and flesh, but more or less so. But if milk is diseased, the butter and cheese made from it must be diseased also.

But milk is sometimes diseased through the vegetables which are eaten by the cow. Every one knows how readily the sensible properties of certain acrid plants are perceived in the milk. Hence as I have elsewhere intimated, we are doubly exposed to danger from eating animal food; first, from the diseases of the animal itself, and secondly, from the diseases which are liable to be induced upon us by the vegetables they use, some of which are not poisonous to them, but are so to us. So that, in avoiding animal food, we escape at least a part of the danger.