In no cases has a return to vegetable diet
produced the slightest injury; in most it has been attended with changes
undeniably beneficial.
produced the slightest injury; in most it has been attended with changes
undeniably beneficial.
Shelley
See Dr.
Lambe's "Reports on
Cancer". I do not assert that the use of water is in itself unnatural,
but that the unperverted palate would swallow no liquid capable of
occasioning disease. )), for the animals drink it too; not the earth we
tread upon; not the unobscured sight of glorious nature, in the wood,
the field, or the expanse of sky and ocean; nothing that we are or do in
common with the undiseased inhabitants of the forest. Something, then,
wherein we differ from them: our habit of altering our food by fire, so
that our appetite is no longer a just criterion for the fitness of its
gratification. Except in children, there remain no traces of that
instinct which determines, in all other animals, what aliment is natural
or otherwise; and so perfectly obliterated are they in the reasoning
adults of our species, that it has become necessary to urge
considerations drawn from comparative anatomy to prove that we are
naturally frugivorous.
Crime is madness. Madness is disease. Whenever the cause of disease
shall be discovered, the root, from which all vice and misery have so
long overshadowed the globe, will lie bare to the axe. All the exertions
of man, from that moment, may be considered as tending to the clear
profit of his species. No sane mind in a sane body resolves upon a real
crime. It is a man of violent passions, bloodshot eyes, and swollen
veins, that alone can grasp the knife of murder. The system of a simple
diet promises no Utopian advantages. It is no mere reform of
legislation, whilst the furious passions and evil propensities of the
human heart, in which it had its origin, are still unassuaged. It
strikes at the root of all evil, and is an experiment which may be tried
with success, not alone by nations, but by small societies, families,
and even individuals.
In no cases has a return to vegetable diet
produced the slightest injury; in most it has been attended with changes
undeniably beneficial. Should ever a physician be born with the genius
of Locke, I am persuaded that he might trace all bodily and mental
derangements to our unnatural habits, as clearly as that philosopher has
traced all knowledge to sensation. What prolific sources of disease are
not those mineral and vegetable poisons that have been introduced for
its extirpation! How many thousands have become murderers and robbers,
bigots and domestic tyrants, dissolute and abandoned adventurers, from
the use of fermented liquors; who, had they slaked their thirst only
with pure water, would have lived but to diffuse the happiness of their
own unperverted feelings! How many groundless opinions and absurd
institutions have not received a general sanction from the sottishness
and intemperance of individuals! Who will assert that, had the populace
of Paris satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable
nature, they would have lent their brutal suffrage to the
proscription-list of Robespierre? Could a set of men, whose passions
were not perverted by unnatural stimuli, look with coolness on an auto
da fe? Is it to be believed that a being of gentle feelings, rising from
his meal of roots, would take delight in sports of blood? Was Nero a man
of temperate life? could you read calm health in his cheek, flushed with
ungovernable propensities of hatred for the human race? Did Muley
Ismael's pulse beat evenly, was his skin transparent, did his eyes beam
with healthfulness, and its invariable concomitants, cheerfulness and
benignity? Though history has decided none of these questions, a child
could not hesitate to answer in the negative. Surely the bile-suffused
cheek of Buonaparte, his wrinkled brow, and yellow eye, the ceaseless
inquietude of his nervous system, speak no less plainly the character of
his unresting ambition than his murders and his victories. It is
impossible, had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders,
that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the
throne of the Bourbons. The desire of tyranny could scarcely be excited
in the individual, the power to tyrannize would certainly not be
delegated by a society neither frenzied by inebriation nor rendered
impotent and irrational by disease. Pregnant indeed with inexhaustible
calamity is the renunciation of instinct, as it concerns our physical
nature; arithmetic cannot enumerate, nor reason perhaps suspect, the
multitudinous sources of disease in civilized life.
Cancer". I do not assert that the use of water is in itself unnatural,
but that the unperverted palate would swallow no liquid capable of
occasioning disease. )), for the animals drink it too; not the earth we
tread upon; not the unobscured sight of glorious nature, in the wood,
the field, or the expanse of sky and ocean; nothing that we are or do in
common with the undiseased inhabitants of the forest. Something, then,
wherein we differ from them: our habit of altering our food by fire, so
that our appetite is no longer a just criterion for the fitness of its
gratification. Except in children, there remain no traces of that
instinct which determines, in all other animals, what aliment is natural
or otherwise; and so perfectly obliterated are they in the reasoning
adults of our species, that it has become necessary to urge
considerations drawn from comparative anatomy to prove that we are
naturally frugivorous.
Crime is madness. Madness is disease. Whenever the cause of disease
shall be discovered, the root, from which all vice and misery have so
long overshadowed the globe, will lie bare to the axe. All the exertions
of man, from that moment, may be considered as tending to the clear
profit of his species. No sane mind in a sane body resolves upon a real
crime. It is a man of violent passions, bloodshot eyes, and swollen
veins, that alone can grasp the knife of murder. The system of a simple
diet promises no Utopian advantages. It is no mere reform of
legislation, whilst the furious passions and evil propensities of the
human heart, in which it had its origin, are still unassuaged. It
strikes at the root of all evil, and is an experiment which may be tried
with success, not alone by nations, but by small societies, families,
and even individuals.
In no cases has a return to vegetable diet
produced the slightest injury; in most it has been attended with changes
undeniably beneficial. Should ever a physician be born with the genius
of Locke, I am persuaded that he might trace all bodily and mental
derangements to our unnatural habits, as clearly as that philosopher has
traced all knowledge to sensation. What prolific sources of disease are
not those mineral and vegetable poisons that have been introduced for
its extirpation! How many thousands have become murderers and robbers,
bigots and domestic tyrants, dissolute and abandoned adventurers, from
the use of fermented liquors; who, had they slaked their thirst only
with pure water, would have lived but to diffuse the happiness of their
own unperverted feelings! How many groundless opinions and absurd
institutions have not received a general sanction from the sottishness
and intemperance of individuals! Who will assert that, had the populace
of Paris satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable
nature, they would have lent their brutal suffrage to the
proscription-list of Robespierre? Could a set of men, whose passions
were not perverted by unnatural stimuli, look with coolness on an auto
da fe? Is it to be believed that a being of gentle feelings, rising from
his meal of roots, would take delight in sports of blood? Was Nero a man
of temperate life? could you read calm health in his cheek, flushed with
ungovernable propensities of hatred for the human race? Did Muley
Ismael's pulse beat evenly, was his skin transparent, did his eyes beam
with healthfulness, and its invariable concomitants, cheerfulness and
benignity? Though history has decided none of these questions, a child
could not hesitate to answer in the negative. Surely the bile-suffused
cheek of Buonaparte, his wrinkled brow, and yellow eye, the ceaseless
inquietude of his nervous system, speak no less plainly the character of
his unresting ambition than his murders and his victories. It is
impossible, had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders,
that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the
throne of the Bourbons. The desire of tyranny could scarcely be excited
in the individual, the power to tyrannize would certainly not be
delegated by a society neither frenzied by inebriation nor rendered
impotent and irrational by disease. Pregnant indeed with inexhaustible
calamity is the renunciation of instinct, as it concerns our physical
nature; arithmetic cannot enumerate, nor reason perhaps suspect, the
multitudinous sources of disease in civilized life.
