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

the laws of health--how could he contract disease? What would there be in his system which could furnish a nidus for its reception? I am well aware that not a few people suppose the most healthy are as much exposed to disease as others, and that there are some who even suppose they are much more so. "Death delights in a shining mark," or something to this effect, is a maxim which has probably had its origin in the error to which I have adverted. To the same source may be traced the strange opinion that a fatal or malignant disease makes its first and most desperate attacks upon the healthy and the robust. The fact is--and this explains the whole riddle--those who are regarded, by the superficial and short-sighted in this matter, as the most healthy and robust, are usually persons whose unhealthy habits have already sown the seeds of disease; and nothing is wanting but the usual circumstances of epidemics to rouse them into action. More than all this, these strong-looking but inwardly-diseased persons are almost sure to die whenever disease does attack them, simply on account of the previous abuses of their constitutions. During the prevalence of the cholera in New York, about the year 1832, all the Grahamites, as they were called, who had for some time abstained from animal food--and their number was quite respectable--and who persevered in it, either wholly escaped the disease, or had it very lightly; and this, too, notwithstanding a large proportion of them were very much exposed to its attacks, living in the parts of the city where it most prevailed, or in families where others were dying almost daily. This could not be the result of mere accident; it is morally impossible. But flesh-eaters--admitting the flesh were wholesome--are not only much more liable to contract disease, but if they contract it, to suffer more severely than others. There is yet another important consideration which belongs to the medical argument. Animal food is much more liable than vegetable food, to those changes or conditions which we call poisonous, and which