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

which follow in its train. Our hope, under God, is, in no small degree, on a radical change in man's dietetic habits--in a return to that simple path of truth and nature, from which, in most civilized countries, those who have the pecuniary means of doing it have unwisely departed. III. THE MEDICAL ARGUMENT. If perfect health is the best preventive and security against disease, and if a well-selected and properly administered vegetable diet is best calculated to promote and preserve that perfect health, then this part of the subject--what I have ventured to call the medical argument--is at once disposed of. The superiority of the diet I recommend is established beyond the possibility of debate. Now that this is the case--namely, that this diet is best calculated to promote perfect health--I have no doubt. For the sake of others, however, it may be well to adduce a few facts, and present a few brief considerations. It is now pretty generally known, that Howard, the philanthropist, was, for about forty years a vegetable-eater, subsisting for much of this time on bread and tea, and that he went through every form of exposure to disease, contagious and non-contagious, perfectly unharmed. And had it not been for other physical errors than those which pertain to diet, I know of no reason why his life might not have been preserved many years longer--perhaps to this time. Rev. Josiah Brewer, late a missionary in Smyrna, was very much exposed to disease, and, like Mr. Howard, to the plague itself; and yet I am not aware that he ever had a single sick day as the consequence of his exposure. I do not know with certainty that he abstains entirely from flesh meat, but he is said to be rigidly temperate in other respects. Those who have read Rush's Inquiries and other writings, are aware that he was very much exposed to the yellow fever in Philadelphia, during the years in which it prevailed there. Now, there is great reason for believing that he owed his exemption from the disease, in part, at least, to