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

at the age of fifty-three, entirely free from every symptom of phthisis for twenty-four years; during which whole period, he was sufficiently vigorous to follow the laborious business of a country physician. The confidence of Dr. Wright in the prophylactic powers of a diet exclusively vegetable, so far as the mere opinion of one medical man is to be received as testimony in the case, is also remarkable. He not only regards the vegetable system as a defence against the diseases of miasmatic regions, but also against the varioloid disease. On the latter point, he goes, it seems, almost as far as Mr. Graham, who appears to regard it not only as, in some measure, a preventive of epidemic diseases generally, in which he is most undoubtedly correct, but also of the small-pox. The testimony on another point which is presented in the replies to Dr. North's questions, is almost equally uniform. In nearly every instance, the individuals who have abandoned animal food have found themselves less subject to colds than before; and some appear to have fallen into the habit of escaping them altogether. When it is considered how serious are the consequences of taking cold--when it is remembered that something like one half of the diseases of our climate have their origin in this source--it is certainly no trifling evidence in favor of a course of regimen, that, besides being highly favorable in every other respect, it should prove the means of freeing mankind from exposure to a malady at once troublesome in itself and disastrous in its consequences. In reply to the question,--Is a vegetable diet more or less aperient than a mixed one,--the answers have been the same, in nearly every instance, that it is more so. The answers to the question whether it was believed the health of either laborers or students would be promoted by the exclusion of animal food from their diet, are rather various. It will be observed, however, that many of the replies, in this case, are medical _opinions_, and come from men who, though they felt themselves bound to state