“And sickness has not taught them the lesson it ought to have done. Instead of regarding their maladies as the necessary consequences of their eating habits, they have looked upon them as the arbitrary inflictions of chance, or of a mysterious Providence. Even when, in the middle ages, the great pestilences prevailed over Europe, at a period of the world’s history when for three hundred years the people literally rioted and revelled in the abundance of flesh blood and alcoholic beverages; and when, during those three centuries, the terrible plague—the ‘Black Death’ and the ‘Great Mortality,’ as it was then called—desolated London, Paris, and other great cities—sweeping off one hundred millions of the earth’s inhabitants—the medical profession, and the people with them, wholly mistook the lesson it taught. “And so it is now. People eat all manner of animal products, with their morbid humours, foul secretions, diseases, impurities and corruptions; and when their bodies become so obstructed and befouled that they retch, and vomit, and spit, and expectorate, and go into fever and inflammation, and gripes and spasms, they wonder what the matter is! And then they send for the family physician, and he wonders also. Why, the only wonder is that they are not all matter!” Throughout the whole of the above argument, I have assumed that the meat eaten is from _healthy_ animals, and have assumed that no diseased meat finds its way upon the table of the average meat-eater—an assumption which is certainly not warranted by facts. I wished, however, to give my adversaries every advantage in this discussion, and for that reason have assumed throughout that the meat was obtained from healthy animals, and was not adulterated before coming to the table. As a matter of fact, however, neither of these two conditions are invariably fulfilled. We might say that the second condition is very rarely fulfilled. It is generally known that meat is inoculated with chemicals of all kinds before it is placed upon the market, and for that reason it is enabled to be shipped from place to place, and to hang in the butcher’s shop by the hour without being kept upon ice—for how, otherwise, could this be? We know that meat decomposes very rapidly—especially in moist or warm weather—but it is apparently enabled to hang, nevertheless, for hours at a time in the butcher’s shop! If chemicals of various kinds were not injected into the meat, this would be impossible. Most graphically does Upton Sinclair describe this process of “pickling” in his book, “The Jungle,” where he says: