← Book details

Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery

Full book · ReadAI club library

Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery

by Alcott, William A. (William Andrus) · Page 119 of 274 · 95,875 words

Tip · Use the reading mode control above and choose Scroll for a smoother flow through the full text.

and of a "Treatise on Digestion." He has also been a medical professor in the University of Vermont, and a public lecturer on health, in Boston. In his work on consumption, while speaking of the prevailing belief of a necessity for the use of animal food to those children who possess the scrofulous or consumptive tendency, he thus remarks: "A diet of milk and mild farinaceous articles, with perhaps light animal decoctions, appears best suited to the early years of life. Whenever there exists an evident inflammatory tendency, as is the case in some scrofulous systems, solid animal food, if used at all, should be taken with the greatest precaution. "And again--how often is it that fat, plethoric, meat-eating children, their faces looking as though the blood was just ready to ooze out, are with the greatest complacency exhibited by their parents as patterns of health! But let it ever be remembered, that the condition of the system popularly called rude or full health, and which is the result of high feeding, is too often closely bordering on a state of disease." In his work on digestion he seems to regard man as naturally an omnivorous animal; and, taking this for granted, he speaks as follows respecting his diet: "One would hardly assert that even in temperate climates his (man's) system requires animal food. I doubt whether any instance can be adduced--unless man be regarded as such--of an omnivorous animal incapable of being adequately nourished by a sufficient and proper vegetable diet. "Man, dwelling in a temperate climate, and with the power to choose, almost uniformly employs a mixture of animal and vegetable food; but how much early education may have to do in forming his taste for a mixed diet it is difficult to estimate. Habit has certainly great influence in attaching us to particular kinds of aliment. One who has long been accustomed to animal food cannot at once abstain from it without experiencing some feebleness for the want of its stimulation, and perhaps even temporary emaciation. And, on the other hand, he who has long been confined

Other legal sources