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
Many cases, like the above, have come under my observation and immediate
attention, and suffice it to say, I have never failed to ameliorate the
condition of every individual that has applied to me, who was suffering
under chronic affections, if they would follow my prescriptions--unless
the system was incapable of reaction.
Yours, truly,
N. J. KNIGHT.
LETTER V.--FROM DR. LESTER KEEP.
FAIR HAVEN, Jan. 22, 1838.
DEAR SIR,--Agreeably to your request, I will inform you that from
September, 1834, to June, 1836, I used no meat at all, except
occasionally in my intercourse with society, I used a little to avoid
attracting notice.
When I commenced my studies, life was burdensome. I knew not, for
months, and I may say years, what enjoyment comfortable health affords.
In a great many ways I can now see that I very greatly erred in my
course of living. I am surprised that the system will hold out in its
powers during so long a process in the use of what I should now consider
the means best calculated to break it down.
I cannot now particularize. But in college, and during my professional
studies, and since, during six or eight years of practice in an arduous
profession, I have been greatly guilty, and neglected those means best
calculated to promote and preserve health; and used those means best
fitted to destroy it. The summers of 1832, 1833, and 1834, were pretty
much lost, from wretched health. I was growing worse every year, and no
medicines that I could prepare for myself, or that were prescribed by
various brother physicians, had any thing more than a temporary effect
to relieve me. All of the year 1834, until September, I used opium for
relief; and I used three and four grains of sulphate of morphine per
day, equal to about sixteen grains of opium. Spirit, wine, and ale I had
tried, and journeys through many portions of the State of Maine, with
the hope that a more northern climate would invigorate and restore a
system that I feared was broken down forever, and that at the age of
thirty-seven. But, without further preamble, I will say, I omitted at
once and entirely the use of tea, coffee, meat, butter, grease of all
sorts, cakes, pies, etc., wine, cider, spirits, opium (which I feared I
must use as long as I lived), and tobacco, the use of which I learned in
college. Of course, from so sudden and so great a change, a most horrid
condition must ensue for many days, for the relief of which I used the
warm bath at first several times a day. I had set no time to omit these
articles, and made no resolutions, except to give this course a trial,
to find out whether I had many native powers of system left, and what
was their character and condition when unaffected by the list of agents
mentioned.
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