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
"When I see milk, oil, emulsion, mild watery fluids, and such like soft
liquors run through leathern tubes or pipes (for such animal veins and
arteries indeed are) for years, without destroying them, and observe on
the other hand that brine, inflammable or urinous spirits, and the like
acrimonious and burning fluids corrode, destroy, and consume them in a
very short time; when I consider the rending, burning, and tearing pains
and tortures of the gout, stone, colic, cancer, rheumatism, convulsions,
and such like insufferably painful distempers; when I see the crises of
almost all acute distempers happen either by rank and fetid sweats,
thick lateritious and lixivious sediments in the urine, black, putrid,
and fetid dejections, attended with livid and purple spots, corrosive
ulcers, impostumes in the joints or muscles, or a gangrene and
mortification in this or that part of the body; when I see the sharp,
the corroding and burning ichor of scorbutic and scrofulous sores,
fretting, galling, and blistering the adjacent parts, with the
inflammation, swelling, hardness, scabs, scurf, scales, and other
loathsome cutaneous foulnesses that attend, the white gritty and chalky
matter, and hard stony or flinty concretions which happen to all those
long troubled with severe gouts, gravel, jaundice, or colic--the
obstructions and hardnesses, the putrefaction and mortification that
happen in the bowels, joints, and members in some of these diseases, and
the rottenness in the bones, ligaments, and membranes that happen in
others; all the various train of pains, miseries, and torments that can
afflict any part of the compound, and for which there is scarce any
reprieve to be obtained, but by swallowing a kind of poison (opiates,
etc.); when I behold with compassion and sorrow, such scenes of misery
and woe, and see them happen only to the rich, the lazy, the luxurious,
and the inactive, those who fare daintily and live voluptuously, those
who are furnished with the rarest delicacies, the richest foods, and the
most generous wines, such as can provoke the appetites, senses, and
passions, in the most exquisite and voluptuous manner; to those who
leave no desire or degree of appetite unsatisfied, and not to the poor,
the low, the meaner sort, those destitute of the necessaries,
conveniences, and pleasures of life; to the frugal, industrious,
temperate, laborious, and active, inhabiting barren and uncultivated
countries, deserts, and forests under the poles or under the line;--I
must, if I am not resolved to resist the strongest conviction, conclude
that it must be something received into the body that can produce such
terrible appearances in it--some flagrant and notable difference in the
food that so sensibly distinguishes them from the latter; and that it is
the miserable man himself that creates his miseries and begets his
torture, or at least those from whom he has derived his bodily organs.
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.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account