have an aversion to the practice of devouring the carcase of an
innocent sufferer, which bad habits improper education, and silly
prejudices have not overcome. This is proved by their affected and
absurd refinement of calling the dead bodies of animals _meat_. If
the meaning of words is to be regarded, this is a gross mistake;
for the word _meat_ is a universal term, applying equally to all
nutritive and palatable substances. If it be intended to express
that all other kinds of food are comparatively not meat, the
intention is ridiculous. The truth is that the proper expression,
_flesh_, conveys ideas of murder and death. Neither can it easily
be forgotten that, in grinding the body of a fellow animal,
substances which constitute _human_ bodies are masticated. This
reflection comes somewhat home, and is recurred to by eaters of
flesh in spite of themselves, but recurred to _unwillingly_. They
attempt, therefore, to pervert language in order to render it
agreeable to the ear, as they disguise animal flesh by cookery in
order to render it pleasing to the taste.”
His reflections upon the essential injustice (to use no stronger term)
of delegating the work of butchering to a particular class of men (to
which frequent reference has already been made in these pages) are
equally admirable:--
“Among butchers, and those who qualify the different parts of an
animal into food, it would be easy to select persons much further
removed from those virtues which should result from reason,
consciousness, sympathy, and animal sensations, than any savages
on the face of the earth! In order to avoid all the generous and
spontaneous sympathies of compassion, the office of shedding
blood is committed to the hands of a set of men who have been
educated in inhumanity, and whose sensibility has been blunted and
destroyed by early habits of barbarity. Thus men _increase_ misery
in order to avoid the sight of it, and because they cannot endure
being obviously cruel themselves, or commit actions which strike
painfully on their senses, they commission those to commit them who
are formed to delight in cruelty, and to whom misery, torture, and
shedding of blood is an amusement! They appear not once to reflect
that _whatever we do by another we do ourselves_.”
“When a large and gentle Ox, after having resisted a ten times
greater force of blows than would have killed his murderers, falls
stunned at last, and his armed head is fastened to the ground with
cords; as soon as the wide wound is made, and the jugular veins
are cut asunder, what mortal can, without horror and compassion,
hear the painful bellowings, intercepted by his flow of blood,
the bitter sighs that speak the sharpness of his anguish, and the
deep-sounding groans with loud anxiety, fetched from the bottom of
his strong and palpitating heart. Look on the trembling and violent
convulsions of his limbs; see, whilst his reeking gore streams from
him, his eyes become dim and languid, and behold his strugglings,
gasps, and last efforts for life.
“When a being has given such convincing and undeniable proofs of
terror and of pain and agony, is there a disciple of Descartes
so inured to blood, as not to refute, by his commiseration, the
philosophy of that vain reasoner?”[216]
In his previous essay, _On the Conduct of Men to Inferior Animals_,
Nicholson has collected from various writers, both humane and
inhumane, a fearful catalogue of atrocities of different kinds
perpetrated upon his helpless dependants by the being who delights to
boast himself (at least in civilised countries) to be made “in the
image and likeness of God.” Among these the hellish tortures of the
vivisectionists and “pathologists” hold, perhaps, the bad pre-eminence,
but the cruel tortures of the Slaughter-House come very near to them in
wanton atrocity.
XXXVII.
ABERNETHY. 1763-1831.
Distinguished as a practical surgeon and as a physiologist, Abernethy
has earned his lasting reputation as having been one of the first
to attack the old prejudice of the profession as to the origin of
diseases, and as having sought for such origin, not in mere local and
accidental but, in general causes--in the constitution and habits of
the body.
A pupil of John Hunter, in 1786 he became assistant surgeon at St.
Bartholomew’s Hospital, and shortly afterwards he lectured on anatomy
and surgery at that institution, which to his ability and genius owes
the fame which it acquired as a school of surgery. As a lecturer he
had a reputation and popularity seldom or perhaps never before so well
earned in the medical schools--founded, as they were, upon a rare
penetration and logical method, united with clearness and perspicuity
in communicating his convictions. In honesty, integrity, and in the
domestic virtues his character was unimpeachable, but the gentleness
of deportment for which he was noted in his home he was far from
exhibiting in public and towards his patients. His roughness and even
coarseness of manner in dealing with capricious valetudinarians,
indeed, became notorious.
_The Constitutional Origin and Treatment of Local Diseases_--his
principal work--in comparison with the vast mass of medical literature
up to that time put forth, stands out in favourable relief. In it two
great principles are laid down--that “local diseases are symptoms of
a disordered constitution, not primary and independent maladies, and
that they are to be cured by remedies calculated to make a salutary
impression on the _general frame_, not by local treatment, nor by
any mere manipulations of surgery.” This single principle changed
the aspect of the entire field of surgery, and elevated it from a
manual art into the rank of a science. And to this first principle
he added a second, the range of which is, perhaps, less extensive,
but the practical importance of which is scarcely inferior to that of
the first--namely, that “this disordered state of the constitution
either originates from, or is rigorously allied with, derangement of
the stomach and bowels, and that it can only be reached by remedies
which first exercise a curative influence upon these organs.” It will
not detract from the merit of Abernethy to add to this account that
his predecessor, Dr. Cheyne, and his contemporary, Dr. Lambe, have
most satisfactorily and radically carried out into practice these just
principles; or to remark that great public reputations ought not to
be allowed, as too often is the fact, to overwhelm less known but not
therefore less meritorious labours.
As to _dietetics_, the theory of Abernethy seems to have been better
than his practice. When reproached with the inconsistency that the
reformed diet which he so forcibly commended to others he himself
failed to follow, he is related to have used the well-known simile of
the sign-post with his usual readiness of repartee.
It was while Dr. Lambe was at the Aldersgate Street Dispensary that
Abernethy formed the acquaintance of that unostentatious but true
reformer--an acquaintance which was destined to have no unimportant
influence upon the medical theories of the great surgeon. Abernethy
was at that time writing his _Observations on Tumours_, and he had
intrusted to his friend one of his cancer patients to be treated by
the non-flesh and distilled water regimen. He carefully watched the
effects, and he has thus given us the results of his observations:--
“There can be no subject which I think more likely to interest
the mind of a surgeon than that of an endeavour to amend and
alter the state of a cancerous constitution. The best timed and
best conducted operation brings with it nothing but disgrace if
the diseased propensities of the constitution are active and
powerful. It is after an operation that, in my opinion, we are
most particularly concerned to regulate the constitution, lest
the disease should be revived or renewed by its disturbance. In
addition to that attention, to tranquillise and invigorate the
nervous system, and keep the digestive organs in as healthy a
state as possible (which I have recommended in my first volume),
I believe general experience sanctions the recommendation of a
more vegetable because less stimulating diet, with the addition of
so much milk, broth, and eggs, as seems necessary to prevent any
declension of the patient’s strength.
“Very recently Dr. Lambe has proposed a method of treating
cancerous diseases, which is _wholly_ dietetic. He recommends
the adoption of a strict vegetable regimen, to avoid the use of
fermented liquors, and to substitute water purified by distillation
in the place of common water as a beverage, and in all parts of
diet in which common water is used, as tea, soups, &c. The grounds
upon which he founds his opinion of the propriety of this advice,
and the prospects of benefit which it holds out, may be seen in his
_Reports on Cancer_, to which I refer my readers.
“My own experience on the effects of this regimen is of course
very limited. Nor does it authorise me to speak decidedly on the
subject. But I think it right to observe that, in one case of
cancerous ulceration in which it was used, the symptoms of the
disease were, in my opinion, rendered more mild, the erysipelatous
inflammation surrounding the ulcer was removed, and the life
of the patient was, in my judgment, considerably prolonged. The
more minute details of the facts constitute the sixth case of Dr.
Lambe’s _Reports_. It seems to me very proper and desirable that
the powers of the regimen recommended by Dr. Lambe should be fairly
tried, for the following reasons:--
“Because I know some persons who, whilst confined to such diet,
have enjoyed very good health; and further, I have known several
persons, who did try the effects of such a regimen, declare that
it was productive of considerable benefit. They were not, indeed,
afflicted with cancer, but they were induced to adopt a change of
diet to allay a state of nervous irritation and correct disorder of
the digestive organs, upon which medicine had but little influence.
“Because _it appears certain, in general, that the body can be
perfectly nourished by vegetables_.
“Because all great changes of the constitution are more likely
to be effected _by alterations of diet and modes of life than by
medicine_.
“Because it holds out a source of hope and consolation to the
patient in a disease in which medicine is known to be unavailing,
and in which surgery affords no more than a temporary relief.”[217]
“The above opinion of Mr. Abernethy,” remarks an experienced authority
upon the subject, “is most valuable, for he watched the case for three
and a half years under Dr. Lambe’s regimen, which is directly opposed
to the system of diet which he had advocated, before he met Dr. Lambe,
in the first volume of his work on _Constitutional Diseases_, and from
his rough honesty there is no doubt that had Dr. Abernethy lived to
publish a second edition he would have corrected his mistake.” As it
is, the candour by which so distinguished an authority was impelled to
alter or modify opinions already put forth to the world, claims our
respect as much as the too general want of it deserves censure.
XXXVIII.
LAMBE. 1765-1847.
One of the most distinguished of the hygeistic and scientific promoters
of the reformed regimen, Dr. Lambe, occupies an eminent position in
the medical literature of vegetarianism, and he divides with his
predecessor, Dr. Cheyne, the honour of being the founder of scientific
_dietetics_ in this country.
His family had been settled some two hundred years in the county of
Hereford, in which they possessed an estate that descended to Dr.
William Lambe, and is now held by his grandson. He early gave promise
of his future mental eminence. Head boy of the Hereford Grammar School,
he proceeded, in due course, to St. John’s College, Cambridge. In
1786, being then in the twenty-first year of his age, he graduated
as fourth wrangler of his year. As a matter of course, he soon was
elected a Fellow of his college, where he continued to reside until his
marriage in 1794. During this period of learned leisure he devoted his
time to the study of medicine, and the MS. notes in the possession of
his biographer, Mr. Hare, “prove the diligence with which he studied
his profession, and there we see the origin of his enlarged views
of the causes of disease, so much insisted on by these fathers of
medicine, and so much neglected by modern physicians in their search
for chemical remedies.” After his marriage he went to reside and
practise in Warwick, where he was the intimate friend of Parr, the
well-known Greek critic, and of Walter Savage Landor, who writes of him
as “very communicative and good humoured. I had enough talk with Lambe
to assure myself that he is no ordinary man.” It was to the discoveries
of Dr. Lambe, and to his publications reporting the curative value of
its mineral waters, that Leamington owed its fame and popularity; and
Dr. Jefferson, in his address to the British Medical Association a few
years ago, thus eulogises him:--
“It was not until the end of the last century that any really
scientific research ever was recorded on this subject [impure
water]. About this period Dr. Lambe was engaged in practice in
Warwick. Somewhat eccentric in some of his practical views, Dr.
Lambe was not the less a scientific man, an intelligent observer
of nature, and an accomplished physician, and was, moreover,
one of the most elegant medical writers of his day. The springs
of the neighbouring village of Leamington did not escape his
observation, and, having carefully studied and analysed the waters,
he published an account of them, in 1797, in the fifth volume of
the _Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Manchester_,
a society embracing the respected names of Priestley, Dalton,
Watt, and others, and not inferior, perhaps, to any contemporary
association in Europe.”
Like many other seceders from orthodox dietetics both before and after
him, Dr. Lambe found himself impelled to experiment in the non-flesh
diet by ill-health. His bodily disorders, indeed, were so complicated
and of such a nature, as to excite astonishment that not only he
greatly mitigated their violence, but that also he survived to an
advanced age. In an exceedingly minute and conscientious narrative of
his own case in his _Additional Reports_ (writing in the third person),
he informs us, that having during several years--from his eighteenth
year--suffered greatly and with constantly aggravated symptoms:--
“He resolved, therefore, finally to execute what he had been
contemplating for some time--to abandon animal food altogether,
and everything analogous to it, and to confine himself wholly to
vegetable food. This determination he put in execution the second
week of February, 1806, and he has adhered to it with perfect
regularity to the present time. His only subject of repentance with
regard to it has been that it had not been adopted much earlier in
life. He never found the smallest real ill-consequence from this
change. He sank neither in strength, flesh, nor in spirits. He
was at all times of a very thin and slender habit, and so he has
continued to be, but upon the whole he has rather gained than lost
flesh. He has experienced neither indigestion nor flatulence even
from the sort of vegetables which are commonly thought to produce
flatulence, nor has the stomach suffered from any vegetable matter,
though unchanged by culinary art or uncorrected by condiments. The
only unpleasant consequence of the change was a sense of emptiness
of stomach, which continued many months. In about a year, however,
he became fully reconciled to the new habit, and felt as well
satisfied with his vegetable meal as he had been formerly with his
dinner of flesh. He can truly say that since he has acted upon
this resolution no year has passed in which he has not enjoyed
better health than in that which preceded it. But he has found
that the changes introduced into the body by a vegetable regimen
take place with extreme slowness; that it is in vain to expect
any _considerable_ amendment in successive weeks or in successive
months. We are to look rather to the intervals of _half-years or
years_.”
With extreme candour as well as carefulness, this patient and
philosophic experimentalist details every particular circumstance of
his own _diagnosis_. After a minute report of the various symptoms of
his maladies and his gradual subjugation of them, he deduces the only
just inference:--
“Granting this representation of facts to be correct, and the
nature of this case to, be truly determined, I must be permitted
to ask, What other method than that which has been adopted would
have produced the same benefit? If such methods exist, I confess
my ignorance of them.... But though these pains [in the head]
still recur in a trifling degree, the relief given to the brain in
general has been decided and most essential. It has appeared in
an increased sensibility of all the organs, particularly of the
senses--the touch, the taste, and the sight, in greater muscular
activity, in greater freedom and strength of respiration, greater
freedom of all the secretions, and in increased intellectual power.
It has been extended to the night as much as to the day. The sleep
is more tranquil, less disturbed by dreams, and more refreshing.
Less sleep, upon the whole, appears to be required; but the loss
of quantity is more than compensated by its being sound and
uninterrupted....
“The hypochondriacal symptoms continued to be occasionally very
oppressive during the second year, particularly during the earlier
part of it, but they afterwards very sensibly declined, and at
present he enjoys more uniform and regular spirits than he had
done for many years upon the mixed diet. From the whole of these
facts it follows that all the organs, and indeed every fibre of
the body, are simultaneously affected by the matters habitually
conveyed into the stomach, and that it is the incongruity of these
matters to the system, which gradually forms that morbid diathesis,
which exists alike both in apparent health and in disease. I might
illustrate this fact still more minutely by observations on the
teeth, on the hair, and on the skin. I might show that by a steady
attention to regimen, the skin of the palm of the hand becomes of a
firmer and stronger texture, that even an excrescence which had for
twenty years and upwards been growing more fixed, firm, and deep,
had, first, its habitudes altered, and, finally, was softened and
disappeared. But, perhaps, enough has been said already to give
a pretty clear idea both of the kind of change introduced into
the habit by diet, and of the extent to which it may be carried.
I proceed, therefore, to relate some new phenomena which took
place during the course of this regimen, which are both curious in
themselves and lead to important conclusions.”
The author then goes on to record further gradual diminution of painful
symptoms. From long and careful observation of himself, amongst other
important deductions, Dr. Lambe infers that:--
“We may conclude that it is the property of this regimen, and, in
particular, of the vegetable diet, to transfer diseased action from
the _viscera_ to the exterior parts of the body--from the central
parts of the system to the periphery. Vegetable diet has often been
charged with causing cutaneous diseases; in common language, they
are, in these cases, said to proceed from poorness of blood.[218]
In some degree the charge is probably just, and the observation I
have already made may give us some insight into the causes of it.
But this charge, instead of being a just cause of reproach, is
_a proof of the superior salubrity of vegetable diet_. Cutaneous
eruptions appear, because disease is translated from the internal
organs to the skin.”
For all brain disease abandonment of the gross and stimulating
flesh-meats is shown to be of the first importance. At the same time,
that it involves any loss of actual bodily strength is a fallacy:--
“We see, then, how ill-founded is the notion that inaction and
loss of power are induced by a vegetable diet. In fact, all the
observations that have been made have shewn the very reverse to be
the truth. Symptoms of plenitude and oppression have continued in
considerable force for at least five years; and the consequence of
this peculiar regimen has been an increase of strength and power,
and not a diminution. In the subject of this case the pulse, which
may be deemed, perhaps, the best idea of the condition of all the
other functions, is at present much more strong and full than under
the use of animal food. It is also perfectly calm and regular.”
His personal experience of satisfaction derivable from vegetables
and fruits as affording, for the most part, sufficient liquids in
themselves, without use of extraneous drinks, is of importance:--
“He had, when living on the common diet, been habitually thirsty,
and, like most persons inclined to studious and sedentary habits,
was much attached to tea-drinking. But for the last two or three
years he has almost wholly relinquished the use of liquids, and by
the substitution of fruit and recent vegetables he has found that
the sensation of thirst has been in a manner abolished. Even tea
has lost its charms, and he very rarely uses it. He is therefore
certain, from his own experience, that the habit of employing
liquids is an artificial habit, and not necessary to any of the
functions of the animal economy.”
Whatever may be thought of the theory of the possibility of entire
abstinence from all _extraneous_ liquids, there is not the least doubt
that a judicious use of vegetable foods reduces to a _minimum_ the
feeling of thirst and craving for artificial drinks, an experience, we
imagine, almost universal with abstinents from flesh-dishes.
Dr. Lambe concludes the first part of his valuable _diagnosis_ with
the assurance, “that if those for whose service these labours are
principally designed, I mean persons suffering under habitual and
chronic illness, are able to go along with me in my argument to form a
general correct notion of what they are to expect from [a reformed]
regimen, and, above all, to arm their minds with firmness, patience,
and perseverance, I shall not readily be induced to think that I have
written one superfluous line.”[219]
In 1805, at the age of forty, we find him established in practice in
London. Five years later he was physician to the General Dispensary,
Aldersgate Street. He was also elected Fellow and Censor of the College
of Physicians, whose meetings he regularly attended. His peculiar
opinions did not tend to secure popularity for him, and the adhesion
of such men as Dr. Abernethy, Dr. Pitcairn, Lord Erskine, and of
Mr. Brotherton, M.P. (one of the earliest members of the Vegetarian
Society), served only to make the indifference of the mass of the
community more conspicuous.
Not the least interesting fact in his life is his share in the
conversion of Shelley, and his friendship with J. F. Newton and his
interesting family, at whose house these earlier pioneers of the New
Reformation were accustomed to meet, and celebrate their charming
_réunions_ with vegetarian feasts. A cardinal part of the dietetic
system of Dr. Lambe was his insistance upon the use of _distilled_
water. In his _Reports on Regimen_ he writes of the Newton family: “I
am well acquainted with a family of young children who have scarcely
ever touched animal food, and who now for three years have drunk only
distilled water. For clearness and beauty of complexion, muscular
strength, fulness of habit free from grossness, hardiness, healthiness,
and ripeness of intellect these children are unparalleled.”[220]