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

eggs, or flesh, is diseased food, and must inevitably, sooner or later, induce disease in those who receive it. Those which are most fattened are the worst, of course; as the hog, the goose, the sheep, and the ox. The more the animal is removed from a natural state, in fattening, the more does the fat accumulate, and the more it is diseased. Hence the complaints against every form of animal oil or fat, in every age, by men who, notwithstanding their complaints, for the most part, continue to set mankind an example of its use. Let me here introduce a single paragraph from Dr. Cheyne, which is very much to my present purpose. "About London, we can scarce have any but crammed poultry or stall-fed butchers' meat. It were sufficient to disgust the stoutest stomach to see the foul, gross, and nasty manner in which, and the fetid, putrid, and unwholesome materials _with_ which they are fed. Perpetual foulness and cramming, gross food and nastiness, we know, will putrefy the juices, and corrupt the muscular substance of human creatures--and sure they can do no less in brute animals--and thus make our food poison. The same may be said of hot-beds, and forcing plants and vegetables. The only way of having sound and healthful animals, is to leave them to their own natural liberty in the free air, and their own proper element, with plenty of food and due cleanliness; and a shelter from the injuries of the weather, whenever they have a mind to retire to it." The argument then is, that, for healthy adults at least, a well-selected vegetable diet, other things being equal, is a preventive of disease, and a security against its violence, should it attack us, in a far greater degree than a diet which includes animal food in any of its numerous forms. It will either prevent the common diseases of childhood, including those which are deemed contagious, or render their attacks extremely mild: it will either prevent or mitigate the symptoms of the severe diseases of adults, not excepting malignant fevers, small-pox, plague,