The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh EatingWilliams, Howard
Philosophy
The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh Eating
Williams, Howard
Diet; Vegetarianism
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.
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