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
It is exceedingly interesting to find an aged physician, especially one
who had formerly been in the habit of using six pints of milk, and
twelve ounces of unfermented biscuit, and of regarding that as a low
diet, reducing himself to one half this quantity in his old age, with
evident advantages; and cheerfully looking forward to a period, as not
many years distant, when he should be obliged to restrict himself to
half even of that quantity. How far he finally carried his temperance,
we do not exactly know. We only know that, after thirty years of health
and successful medical practice, he strenuously contended for the
superiority of a vegetable and milk diet over any other, whether for the
feeble or the healthy. But his numerous works abound with the most
earnest exhortations to temperance in all things, and with the most
interesting facts and cogent reasonings; and--I repeat it--if there be
any individual, since the days of Pythagoras, whose name ought to be
handed down to posterity as the father of the vegetable system of
living, it is that of Dr. Cheyne.
Among his works are, a work on Fevers; an Essay on the true Nature and
proper Method of treating the Gout; a work on the Philosophical
Principles of Religion; an Essay of Health and Long Life; a work called
the English Malady; and another entitled the Natural Method of Cure in
the Diseases of the Body, and the Distempers of the Mind depending
thereon. The latter, and his Essay of Long Life are, in my view, his
greatest works; though the history of his own experience is chiefly
contained in his English Malady.
I shall now proceed to make such extracts from his works, as seem to me
most striking and important to the general reader. They are somewhat
numerous, and there may be a few repetitions; but I was more anxious to
preserve his exact language--which is rather prolix--than to abridge too
much, at the risk of misrepresenting his sentiments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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