Читать книгу Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages - William A. Alcott - Страница 62

North Brookfield, Oct. 26, 1827.

Though I would by no means favor the propensity for book-making, so prevalent in our day, yet I have been long of the opinion that a work on vegetable diet for general readers was greatly needed. I need it in my family; and there are many others in this vicinity who would be materially benefited by such a work.

I have had no means of ascertaining the good or bad effects of a "diet exclusively vegetable in cases of phthisis, scrofula, and dyspepsia," for I have had none of the above diseases to contend with. But, since your letter was received, I have been called to prescribe for a man who has been a flesh eater for more than half a century. He was confined to his house, had been losing strength for several months, still keeping up his old habits. The disease which was preying upon him was chronic inflammation of the right leg; the flesh had been so long swollen and inflamed that it had become hard to the touch. There were ulcers on his thigh, and some had made their appearance on the hip. This disease had been of seven months' standing, though not in so aggravated a form as it now appeared. During this time, all the local applications had been made that could be thought of by the good ladies in the neighborhood; and after every thing of the kind had failed, they concluded to send for "the doctor."

After examining the patient attentively, I became convinced that the disease, which developed itself locally, was of a constitutional origin, and of course could not be cured by local remedies. All local applications were discontinued; the patient was put on a vegetable diet after the alimentary canal was freely evacuated. I saw this man three days afterward. The dark purple appearance of the leg had somewhat subsided; the red and angry appearance about the base of the ulcers was gone, his strength improved, etc. Three days after I called, I found him in his garden at work.

He is now—two weeks since my first prescription—almost well. All the ulcers have healed, with the exception of one or two. This man, who thinks it wicked not to use the good things God has given us—such as meat, cider, tobacco, etc.—is very willing to subsist, for the present, on vegetable food, because he finds it the only remedy for his disease.

Early in the spring of 1830, while a student at Amherst College, I was attacked with dyspepsia, which rendered my life wretched for more than a year, and finally drove me from college; but it had now so completely gained the mastery, that no means I resorted to for relief afforded even a palliation of my sufferings. After I had suffered nearly two years in this way, I was made more wretched, if possible, by frequent attacks of colic, with pains and cramps extending to my back; and so severe had these pains become, that the prescriptions of the most eminent physicians afforded only partial relief.

On the 13th of February, 1833, after suffering from the most violent paroxysm I had ever endured, I left my home for Brunswick, Maine, to attend a course of medical lectures. For several days I boarded at a public house, and ate freely of several substantial dishes that were before me. The consequence was a fresh attack of colic. From some circumstances that came up at this time, I was convinced that flesh meats had much to do with my sufferings, and the resolution was formed at once to change my diet and "starve" out dyspepsia.

I took a room by myself, and made arrangements for receiving a pint of milk per day; this, with coarse rye and Indian bread, constituted my only food. After living in this way a week or two, I had a free and natural evacuation. Thus nature began to effect what medicine alone had done for nearly three years. The skin became moist, and my voracious appetite began to subside. I returned home to my friends at the close of the term well, and have been well ever since—have never had a colic pain or any costiveness since that time. My powers of digestion are good, and though I do not live so rigidly now as when at Brunswick, I always feel best when my food is vegetables and milk. I can endure fatigue and exposure as well as any man. On this mild diet, too, my muscular strength has considerably increased; and every day is adding new vigor to my constitution.

Having experienced so much benefit from a mild diet, and being rationally convinced that man was a fruit-eating animal naturally, I made my views public by a course of lectures on physiology, which I delivered in the Lyceum soon after I came to this place (three years ago). The consequence was, that quite a number of those who heard my lectures commenced training their families as well as themselves to the use of vegetables, etc., and I am happy to inform you that, at this day, many of our most active influential business-doing men are living in the plainest and most simple manner.

One of my neighbors has taken no flesh for more than three years. He is of the ordinary height, and sanguine temperament, and usually weighed, when he ate flesh, one hundred and eighty pounds. After he changed his diet, his countenance began to change, and his cheeks fell in; and his meat-eating friends had serious apprehensions that he would survive but a short time, unless he returned to his former habits. But he persevered, and is now more vigorous and more athletic than any man in the region, or than he himself has ever been before.

His muscular strength is very great. A few days since, a number of the most athletic young men in our village were trying their strength at lifting a cask of lime, weighing five hundred pounds. All failed to do it, with the exception of one, who partly raised it from the ground. After they were gone, this vegetable eater without any difficulty raised the cask four or five times. More than three years ago this man lost his daughter, who fell a prey to cholera infantum; he has now a daughter rather more than a year old, whom he has trained on strictly physiological principles; and though very feeble at birth, and for three months subsequently, she is now the most healthy child in the town. This child had some of the first symptoms of consumption last August, owing to the too free indulgence of the mother in improper articles of food; but being treated with demulcents, at the same time correcting the mother's system, she recovered, and is now the "picture of health."

I was conversing with this gentleman the other day respecting his health—says he is perfectly well, weighs one hundred and sixty-five pounds; and though he was called well when eating flesh, he was not so in reality; for every few weeks he was troubled with headache and a sense of fullness in the region of the stomach, for which he was obliged to take an active cathartic. For a few months before he adopted the vegetable system, he had decided symptoms of congestion in the head, such as precede apoplexy. I questioned him as to his appetite. He informed me, that when he ate meat he had such an unconquerable desire for food about eleven o'clock, that he could not wait till noon. This he calls "meat hunger," for it disappeared soon after he came to the present style of living. He has no craving now; but when he begins to eat, the zest is exquisite.

Yours,

Joshua Porter.