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

by William A. Alcott

I know how it strikes many when they find such men as Gassendi, admitting the doctrines for which I contend, in theory, and even strenuously defending them, and yet setting them at naught in practice. Surely, say they, such persons cannot be sincere. For myself, however, I draw a very different conclusion. Their conduct is perfectly in harmony with that of the theoretic friends of cold water, plain dress, and abstemiousness in general. They are compelled to admit the truth; but it is so much against their habits, as in the case of Gassendi, besides being still more strongly opposed to their lusts and appetites, that they cannot, or rather, will not conform to what they believe, in their daily practice. Their testimony, to me, is the strongest that can be obtained, because they testify against themselves, and in spite of themselves.

PROF. HITCHCOCK.

This gentleman, a distinguished professor in Amherst College, is the author of a work, entitled "Dyspepsia Forestalled and Resisted," which has been read by many, and execrated by not a few of those who are so wedded to their lusts as to be unwilling to be told of their errors.

I am not aware that Professor H. has any where, in his writings, urged a diet exclusively vegetable, for all classes of the community, although I believe he does not hesitate to urge it on all students; and one might almost infer, from his works of various kinds, that if he is not already a believer in the doctrines of its universal superiority to a mixed diet, he is not very far from it. In a sermon of his, in the National Preacher, for November, 1834, he calls a diet exclusively vegetable, a "proper course of living."

I propose to add here a few anecdotes of his, which I know not how to find elsewhere.

"Pythagoras restricted himself to vegetable food altogether, his dinner being bread, honey, and water; and he lived upward of eighty years. Matthew (St. Matthew, I suppose he means), according to Clement, lived upon vegetable diet. Galen, one of the most distinguished of the ancient physicians, lived one hundred and forty years, and composed between seven and eight hundred essays on medical and philosophical subjects; and he was always, after the age of twenty-eight, extremely sparing in the quantity of his food. The Cardinal de Salis, Archbishop of Seville, who lived one hundred and ten years, was invariably sparing in his diet. One Lawrence, an Englishman, by temperance and labor lived one hundred and forty years; and one Kentigern, who never tasted spirits or wine, and slept on the ground and labored hard, died at the age of one hundred and eighty-five. Henry Jenkins, of Yorkshire, who died at the age of one hundred and sixty-nine, was a poor fisherman, as long as he could follow this pursuit; and ultimately he became a beggar, living on the coarsest and most sparing diet. Old Parr, who died at the age of one hundred and fifty-three, was a farmer, of extremely abstemious habits, his diet being solely milk, cheese, coarse bread, small beer, and whey. At the age of one hundred and twenty he married a second wife by whom he had a child. But being taken to court, as a great curiosity, in his one hundred and fifty-second year, he very soon died—as the physicians decidedly testified, after dissection, in consequence of a change from a parsimonious to a plentiful diet. Henry Francisco, of this country, who lived to about one hundred and forty, was, except for a certain period, remarkably abstemious, eating but little, and particularly abstaining almost entirely from animal food; his favorite articles being tea, bread and butter, and baked apples. Mr. Ephraim Pratt, of Shutesbury, Mass., who died at the age of one hundred and seventeen years, lived very much upon milk, and that in small quantity; and his son, Michael Pratt, attained to the age of one hundred and three, by similar means."

Speaking, in another place, of a milk diet, Professor H. observes, that "a diet chiefly of milk produces a most happy serenity, vigor, and cheerfulness of mind—very different from the gloomy, crabbed, and irritable temper, and foggy intellect, of the man who devours flesh, fish, and fowl, with ravenous appetite, and adds puddings, pies, and cakes to the load."

LORD KAIMS.

Henry Home, otherwise called Lord Kaims, the author of the "Elements of Criticism," and of "Six Sketches on the History of Man," has, in the latter work, written eighty years ago, the following statements respecting the inhabitants of the torrid zone:

"We have no evidence that either the hunter or shepherd state were ever known there. The inhabitants at present subsist upon vegetable food, and probably did so from the beginning."