Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable CookeryAlcott, William A. (William Andrus)
Science
Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery
Alcott, William A. (William Andrus)
Food; Vegetarianism
"My business requires a great degree of activity, and I can truly say
that I am a stranger to weariness or languor. At the time of entering
upon this system, I had a wife and five children, the youngest eight
years of age;--they all soon entered upon the same course of living with
myself, and soon were all benefited in health. I have now six
children--the youngest fifteen months old, and as happy as a lark.
Previous to the time of our adopting the present system of living, my
expenses for medicine and physicians would range from $20 to $30 a
year--for the last four years it has been nothing worth naming."
REV. JOSEPH EMERSON.
Mr. Emerson was a teacher of eminence, known throughout the United
States, but particularly so in Massachusetts and Connecticut. He died in
the latter state, in 1833, aged about fifty-five. He had long been a
miserable dyspeptic, but was probably kept alive amid certain strange
violations of physical law, such as studying hard till midnight, for
example, for many years, by his great care in regard to his diet. Mrs.
Banister, late Miss Z. P. Grant (the associate, at Ipswich, of Miss
Lyon, who died recently at South Hadley, who was his pupil), thus speaks
of his rigid habits:
"He not only uniformly rejected whatever food he had decided to be
injurious to him, but whatever he deemed necessary for his food or
drink, was always taken, whether at home or abroad. As his diet, for
several years, consisted generally, either of bread and milk, or of
bread and butter, what solid food he wanted could be supplied at any
table."[16]
It is also testified of him, by his brother, Prof. Emerson, of Andover,
that "for more than thirty years he adopted the practice of eating but
one kind at a meal." If I do not misremember, for I knew him well, he
was in favor of banishing flesh and fish, and substituting milk and
fruits in their stead, on Bible ground.--I refer here to the Divine
arrangement in the first chapter of Genesis; and which has never, that I
am aware, been altered.
TAK SISSON.
Tak Sisson, as he was called, was a slave in the family of a man in
Rhode Island, before and during the Revolution.
From early childhood he could never be prevailed on to eat any flesh or
fish, but he subsisted on vegetable food and milk; neither could he be
persuaded to eat high seasoned food of any kind. When he was a child,
his parents used to scold him severely, and threaten to whip him because
he refused to eat flesh. They said to him (as I have been told a
thousand times), that if he did not eat meat he would never be good for
any thing, but would always be a poor, puny creature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account