friends of Dr. Lambe. That more humane and distinguished lawyer, in
a letter to his friend acknowledging the receipt of the _Reports_,
writes as follows: “I am of opinion that both this work and the other
referred to in it are deserving of the highest consideration. I read
them both with more interest and attention from the abuse of the
_British Critic_ [one of the periodicals of the day] mentioned in the
preface, as no periodical criticism ever published in this country is
so uniformly unjust, ignorant, and impudent.” Dr. Abernethy’s testimony
to the efficacy of abstinence in cases of cancer will be found in
the notice of that eminent practitioner. Amongst the most interesting
correspondence of his later years is his interchange of ideas with
Sylvester Graham--the first of the American prophets of the reformed
regimen. The letter to the celebrated American vegetarian is, as Dr.
Lambe’s latest biographer justly observes, “a most valuable relic,
because it continues the result of Dr. Lambe’s diet up to September,
1837--twenty-three years after the last notice of his health in the
account of his own case, which he published in November, 1814. It is,
besides, an admirable proof of his truthful and philosophic mind, which
was slow to arrive at conclusions, and willing rather to exaggerate
than otherwise the traces of disease which he still felt.” He proves,
also, in this letter, how slow and yet sure are the effects of diet,
and it supplies an answer to those objectors who complain that they
have tried the diet (perhaps for a few weeks only) without any good
result. After complimenting his transatlantic fellow-worker in the
cause of truth upon his zeal and industry, Dr. Lambe proceeds:--
“My book, entitled _Additional Reports on Regimen_, has now been
before the world three and twenty years. That it has attracted
little notice, and still less popular favour--though it may have
excited in the writer some mortification--has not occasioned
much surprise. The doctrine it seeks to establish is in direct
opposition to popular and deep-rooted prejudice. It is thought
(most erroneously) to attack the best enjoyments and most solid
comforts of life; and, moreover, it has excited the bitter
hostility of a numerous and influential body in society--I mean
that body of medical practitioners who exercise their profession
for the sake of its profits merely, and who appear to think that
disease was made for the profession and not the profession for
disease.
“To drop, however, all idle complaints of public neglect, let
us go to the more useful inquiry whether or not the principles
propounded in these _Reports_ have been confirmed by subsequent and
more extensive experience. To this inquiry I answer directly and
fearlessly, that in the interval between the present time and the
year 1815 (the date of that publication) the practice recommended
has succeeded in cases very numerous and of extreme variety, and
I can promise the practitioner who will try it fairly and judge
with candour that he will experience no disappointment. I say,
_let him try it fairly_. I do not assert that it will succeed
in cases where the powers of life are sunk, in confirmed hectic
fever, in ulcerated cancer, in established chronic disease, or in
the decrepitude of old age. I may have attempted the relief of
such cases in an early stage of my experiments, but experience
speedily demonstrated the hopelessness of such attempts. But let
subjects be taken not far advanced in life, let them be _tabid_
children (for example) with tumid abdomen, swelled joints, and
depraved appetites, or with obstinate cutaneous diseases, erythema,
_scabus_, rickets, epileptic convulsions (not grown habitual by
long continuance). But a practitioner in moderate practice will
find no difficulty in selecting proper subjects, if he is himself
actuated by a regard to humanity united to principles of honour.
“Moreover, let not the patient, particularly if arrived at
mature age, expect to receive a perfect cure. In many cases the
consequences are rather preventive than curative. This I hold to
be no objection. It is enough, surely, if a disease which, from
its nature, might be expected to be continually on the increase,
is obviously checked in its progress, if the symptoms become more
and more mild, and if a human being is preserved in comfortable
existence who would otherwise have been consigned to the grave.”
He devoted his great medical knowledge and experience particularly to
the cure or mitigation of cancer. In the letter, from which we have
already quoted, he informs his correspondent of this interesting fact:--
“My most ardent wish was to attempt the relief of cases of cancer.
This object I have steadily pursued (from the year 1803) to the
present day. The case--the particulars of which I briefly mentioned
to you in my former communication--has hitherto succeeded so
perfectly that I should myself suspect an error in the _diagnosis_,
if it were not for the strongly-marked constitutional symptoms,
which are such as, in my mind, put it out of doubt. There does not
now remain what I expected, and what I have called a _nucleus_,
for the resolution is _complete_. Now, this is contrary to most
of my former observations, and would furnish, as I have said,
some ground of suspicion. But still it is not wholly unsupported
by corroborative facts. I have observed, particularly in one
case, that the whole extreme edge of a schirrous tumour has
been restored, whilst the portion has remained unchanged; not,
indeed, speedily as in the former case, but after having used the
diet for a very considerable time. Now, if a portion of a true
schirrous tumour can be resolved, there can be no reason why a
resolution of the whole--taken very early and under favourable
circumstances--shall be deemed impossible. The truth is, that at
present we are not advanced enough to form general conclusions, but
ought to content ourselves with _accumulating_ facts for the use of
our successors.”
If the experience of the benefits of a reasonable living in the cases
of his patients was thus satisfactory, he himself afforded, in his own
person, perhaps the best testimony to its revivifying and invigorating
qualities. One of his visitors gives his impressions of the now famous
_doctor_ (a title, in the present instance, of real meaning) as follow:
“Agreeably to your request, I submit to your perusal a short account of
the friendly interview I had with Dr. Lambe in London. I first called
on him in February. I found him to be very gentlemanly in manners and
venerable in appearance. He is rather taller than the middle height.
His hair is perfectly white, for he is now seventy-two years of age.
He told me he had been on the vegetable diet thirty-one years, and
that his health was better now than at forty, when he commenced his
present system of living. He considers himself as likely to live
thirty years longer as to have lived to his present age.... Although
he is seventy-two years of age he walks into town, a distance of three
miles from his residence, every morning, and back at night. Dr. Lambe,
I am told, has spent large sums of money in making experiments and
publishing their results to the world.” In his earlier life he had
been conspicuously thin and attenuated. In later years he seems to
have acquired even a certain amount of robustness, and he is described
as being active and strong at an advanced age. Some instances of
extraordinary energy and endurance have been put on record by his
family; and his feats of pedestrianism, when he was verging on his
eightieth year, are, we imagine, rarely to be paralleled.
His hope of attaining the age of one hundred years, unhappily, was
not to be fulfilled. “Our bodies,” his biographer justly remarks,
“are but machines adapted to perform a definite amount of work, and
Dr. Lambe’s originally weak constitution had been severely tried by
sickness and wrong diet during the first forty years of his life. At
the age of eighty his strength began to fail, but his grandson writes,
‘up to a very short time before his death there were no outward signs
of ill-health, only the marks of old age.’”[221] Existence had its
enjoyment for him up to almost the last days, and his intellectual
powers remained to the end. He calmly expired in his eighty-third year.
Of contemporary and posthumous eulogies of his personal, as well as
scientific, worth, the following may suffice: “A man of learning, a
man of science, a man of genius, a man of distinguished integrity
and honour.” Such is the testimony of his friend Dr. Parr, as quoted
by Samuel Johnson. In the Anniversary Harveian Oration before the
College of Physicians, by Dr. Francis Hawkins, in the year 1848, the
representative of the Faculty thus recalls his memory: “Nor can I pass
over in silence the loss we have sustained in Dr. William Lambe--an
excellent chemist, a learned man, and a skilful physician. His manners
were simple, unreserved, and most modest. His life was pure. Farewell,
therefore, gentle spirit, than whom no one more pure and innocent has
passed away!”
XXXIX.
NEWTON. 1770-1825.
John Frank Newton, the friend and associate of Dr. Lambe, Shelley,
and the little band who met at the house of the former to share his
vegetarian repasts, appears to have been one of the earliest converts
of Dr. Lambe, to whom he dedicated his _Return to Nature_, in gratitude
for the recovery of his health through the adoption of the reformed
regimen.
He published his little work, as he informs us in his preface, to
impart to others the benefits which he himself had experienced; and
especially to make known to the heads of households the fact that his
whole family of himself, wife, and four children under nine years of
age, with their nurse, had been living, at the date of his publication,
for two years upon a non-flesh diet, during which time the apothecary’s
bill, he tells us, had amounted to the sum of sixpence; and that charge
had been incurred by himself.
The ever-memorable meetings of the reformers at the house of Newton,
where Shelley was a constant guest, have been thus recorded by one of
the biographers of the great poet:--“Shelley was intimate with the
Newton family, and was converted by them in 1813, and he began then a
strict vegetable diet. His intimate association with the amiable and
accomplished votaries of a _Return to Nature_ was perhaps the most
pleasing portion of his poetical, philosophical, and lovely life....
For some years I was in the thick of it; for I lived much with a
select and most estimable society of persons (the Newtons), who had
‘returned to Nature,’ and I heard much discussion on the topic of
vegetable diet. Certainly their vegetable dinners were delightful,
elegant, and excellent repasts; flesh, fowl, fish, and ‘game’ never
appeared--nor eggs nor butter _bodily_, but the two latter were
admitted into cookery, but as sparingly as possible, and under protest,
as not approved of and soon to be dispensed with. We had soups in great
variety, that seemed the more delicate from the absence of flesh-meat.
“There were vegetables of every kind, plainly stewed or scientifically
disguised. Puddings, tarts, confections and sweets abounded. Cheese
was excluded. Milk and cream might not be taken unreservedly, but they
were allowed in puddings, and sparingly in tea. Fruits of every kind
were welcomed. We luxuriated in tea and coffee, and sought variety
occasionally in cocoa and chocolate. Bread and butter, and buttered
toast were eschewed; but bread, cakes, and plain seed-cakes were
liberally divided among the faithful.”[222]
The cause of the publication of his book Newton thus states:--
“Having for many years been an habitual invalid, and having at
length found that relief from regimen which I had long and vainly
hoped for from drugs, I am anxious, from sympathy with those
afflicted, to impart to others the knowledge of the benefit I have
experienced, and to dispel, as far as in me lies, the prejudices
under which I conceive mankind to labour on points so nearly
connected with their health and happiness.
“The particulars of my case I have already related at the
concluding pages of Dr. Lambe’s _Reports on Cancer_. To the account
there given I have little to add, but that, by continuing to
confine myself to the regimen advised in that work, I continue to
experience the same benefit; that the winter which has just elapsed
has been passed much more comfortably than that which preceded it,
and that, if my habitual disorder is not completely eradicated, it
is so much subdued as to give but little inconvenience; that I have
suffered but a single day’s confinement for several months; and,
upon the whole, that I enjoy an existence which many might envy who
consider themselves to be in full possession of the blessings of
health.
“All that I have to regret in my present undertaking is the
imperfect way in which it is executed. The adepts in medicine
have gained their knowledge originally from the experience of the
sick. I have taken my own sensations for my guide, and am myself
alone responsible for the conclusions which I have drawn from
them, the manuscript of this volume having been neither corrected
nor looked over by any individual. While I make no pretensions to
medical science, I cannot consent to be reasoned or ridiculed out
of my feelings; nor to believe that to be an illusion, the truth
of which has been confirmed to me by long-continued and repeated
observation.”
The use of distilled water was a cardinal article in the dietary creed
of his friend Dr. Lambe, and upon this point Newton particularly
insists. He appeals with much fervour, as we have just stated, to
parents to have recourse to the natural means of prevention and
cure, in place of vainly trying every available _artificial_ method
by medicine and drugs. He instances, with minute particularity, the
regimen of his children, whom he asserts to have been, up to the moment
of his writing, perfectly free from any sort of malady or disorder, and
to be--
“So remarkably healthy that several medical men who have seen
and examined them with a scrutinizing eye, all agreed in the
observation that they knew nowhere a whole family which equals
them in robustness. Should the success of this experiment, now of
three years’ standing, proceed as it has begun, there is little
doubt, [he ventures to flatter himself] that it must at length
have some influence with the public, and that every parent who
finds the illness of his family both afflicting and expensive, will
say to himself ‘Why should I any longer be imprudent or foolish
enough to have my children sick?’ All hail to the resolution which
that sentiment implies! But until it becomes general, I feel it
necessary to exhort, in the warmest language I can think of, those
who have the young in their charge to institute an experiment
which I have made before them with the completest success. To
those parents especially do I address myself who, aware that
temperance in enjoyment is the best warrant of its duration, feel
how dangerous and how empty are all the feverous amusements of
our assemblies, our dinners, and our theatres, compared with the
genuine and tranquil pleasures of a happy circle at home.”
He presents an alluring picture of the health-producing results for the
young of the natural regimen. He promises that
“They will become not only more robust but more beautiful;
that their carriage will be erect, their step firm; that their
development at a critical period of youth, the prematurity of which
has been considered an evil, will be retarded; that, above all,
the danger of being deprived of them will in every way diminish;
while by these light repasts their hilarity will be augmented, and
their intellects cleared in a degree which shall astonishingly
illustrate the delightful effects of this regimen.... I will
beg here to attempt an answer in this place to that trite and
specious objection to Dr. Lambe’s opinions that ‘what is suitable
to one constitution may be not so to another.’ If there be a
single person existing, whose health would not be improved by the
vegetable diet and distilled water, then the whole system falls
at once to the ground. The question is simply, whether fruits and
other vegetables be not the natural sustenance of man, who would
have occasion for no other drink than these afford, and whose
thirst is at present excited by an unnatural flesh diet, which
causes his disorders bodily and mentally.... Another objection
sometimes urged is this: ‘If children, brought up on a vegetable
regimen, should at a future period of their lives adopt a flesh
diet, they will certainly suffer more from the change than they
otherwise would have done.’ The very contrary of this, I conceive,
would happen. The stomach is so fortified by the general increase
of health, that a person thus nourished is enabled to bear what
one whose humours are less impaired would sink under. The children
of our family can each of them eat a dozen or eighteen walnuts for
supper without the most trifling indigestion, an experiment which
those who feed their children in the usual manner would consider
it adventurous to attempt. So also the Irish porters in London
bear these alterations of diet successfully, and owe much of their
actual vigour to the vegetable food of their forefathers, and
to their own, before they emigrated from Ireland, where, in all
probability, they did not taste flesh half-a dozen times in the
year.”
As to another well-known pretext, that the propensity to flesh-eating,
and the relish with which it is evidently enjoyed by the majority
of flesh eaters, is proof of its fitness, Newton justly objects the
various unnatural and disgusting foods of many savage peoples which are
eaten with equal relish, so that “the argument of the agreeable flavour
proves nothing, I apprehend, by proving too much.” He exhorts the
medical faculty generally, and those members of it who are in charge of
hospitals, infirmaries, or workhouses, to try the effect of the pure
regimen on the sufferers and patients--in particular, in the cases of
the victims of cancer. Amongst others of his personal acquaintance who
had derived the greatest benefit from the regimen, he instances Dr.
Adam Ferguson, the historian of the Roman Republic, who lived strictly
on a vegetable diet. He was in the habit of accompanying Mr. Newton,
in the year 1794, in rides through the environs of Rome. He was still
living in 1811, and he died, in fact, at the age of ninety, holding a
professorship in the University of Edinburgh.
XL.
GLEÏZÈS. 1773-1843.
Of all the enlightened and humane spirits to which the philosophic
eighteenth century gave birth, and who were quickened into activity
by the great movement which originated in France in its last quarter,
not one, assuredly, was actuated by a purer and more exalted feeling
than Jean Antoine Gleïzès--the most _enthusiastic_, perhaps, of all
the apostles of humanity and of refinement. He was born at Dourgne,
in the (present) department of the Tarn. His father was advocate to
the old provincial parliament. His mother’s name was Anna Francos.
After attending preliminary schools, he applied himself to the study
of medicine--urged, says his biographer, more by love of his species
than by predilection for the profession. His intense horror of the
vivisectional experiments in the physiological torture-dens soon
compelled him to abandon his intended career: the experience, however,
gained during his brief medical course he was able to utilize more than
once in his after life for the benefit of his neighbours.
The earlier period of the Revolution had been hailed by him, still
very young as he then was, as the hopeful beginning of a new era; when
its direction, unhappily, fell into the hands of fanatical leaders,
who, following too much the examples of the old _régimes_, thought,
by wholesale executions, to clear the way for the establishment of a
universal republic and of lasting peace. The youthful enthusiast, whose
whole soul revolted from the very idea of bloodshed and of suffering,
withdrew despairing into solitude, and devoted himself to scientific
and literary studies, and to calm contemplation of Nature.
In 1794, at the age of 21, Gleïzès married Aglae de Baumelle, daughter
of a writer of some repute. At this time he seems to have entertained
the hope of instructing his countrymen, by engaging in public teaching;
but, disappointed in a scheme for the inauguration of a course of
historical lectures in the central school of his department, he retired
altogether from the active business of the world, and settled down in
a happy and peaceful home, in a small château belonging to his wife,
at the foot of the Pyrenees near Mezières. It was here, amidst the
magnificent solitudes of Nature, that in 1798, in his twenty fifth
year, he determined upon abandoning for ever the diet of blood and
slaughter. Until the moment of his death, forty-five years later, his
diet consisted solely of milk, fruits, and vegetables.
So great was his scrupulousness, that there might be no possibility or
mistake Gleïzès prepared his own food; and he always ate alone (his
wife being unable or unwilling to follow his loftier aims), since he
could not endure either the smell or the sight of the ordinary dishes.
And this intense aversion it was, indeed, that compelled him to forego
in great measure his intercourse with the world, or, at all events, to
shun the ordinary celebrations of social “festivity.”
Full of enthusiastic belief that the transparent truth and sublimity of
his creed could not fail to commend themselves to the better spirits
of the age amongst his countrymen, Gleïzès addressed himself to some
of the more thoughtful of his contemporaries; amongst others to
Lamartine, Lamennais, and Chateâubriand. Lamartine--the author of the
_Fall of an Angel_, in which he gives expression to his akreophagistic
sympathies--responded, if not with the enthusiasm that might justly
have been expected from the author of that poem, at least in a friendly
spirit. The others kept silence. This indifferentism of those who
should have been the first to lend the support of their names naturally
affected him; and made much more sensible the intellectual and moral
isolation of his existence. He was not left quite alone, however.
There were found three or four minds of a loftier reach who had the
courage of their convictions, and followed them out to their logical
conclusion. These were Anquetil (the author of _Recherches sur les
Indes_), Charles Nodier, Girod de Chantrans, and Cabantous, dean of the
Faculty of Letters at Toulouse. His brother, Colonel Gleïzès, a member
of the Academy of Sciences of the same university, also declared for
the reformation. It is superflous to say that these converts were all
men of superior moral calibre to their contemporaries, however high
they might be exalted by popular estimates of worth.
Deeply sensible as he was of the profound selfishness and
indifferentism of the world surrounding him upon the subject which
to him had all the interest and importance of a new religion, he yet
constantly displayed the benevolence of his disposition, and the
beneficence of his morality, in his efforts for the good of all with
whom he came in contact, and particularly in respect to his domestics
and his tenants, amongst whom his memory was long held in reverence.
“His exalted nature,” states his brother, “glowed with enthusiasm for
everything true and good.” His “life-sorrow” seems to have been the
want of sympathy on the part of his wife, to whom, nevertheless, he
proved an indulgent husband.