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

facts, were doubtless, with very few exceptions, prejudiced against an exclusively vegetable regimen for the healthy. It is, therefore, to me, a matter of surprise, to find some of them in favor of the said prescribed course of regimen, both for students and laborers, and many of them in favor of the discontinuance of animal food by students. Those who have themselves made the experiment, with hardly an exception, are decidedly in favor of a vegetable regimen for all classes of mankind, particularly the sedentary. And in regard to the necessity of diminishing the proportion of animal food consumed by all classes, there seems to be but one voice. On one more important point there is a very general concurrence of opinion. I allude to the choice of articles from the vegetable kingdom. The farinacea are considered as the best; especially wheat, ground without bolting. The preference of Dr. Preston is an exception; and there are one or two others. On the whole--I repeat it--the testimony is far more favorable to the "prescribed course of regimen," both for the healthy and diseased than under the circumstances connected with the inquiry the most thorough-going vegetable eater could possibly have anticipated. If this is a fair specimen--and I know no reason why it may not be regarded as such--of the results of similar experiments and similar observations among medical men throughout our country, could their observations and experiments be collected, it certainly confirms the views which some among us have long entertained on this subject, and which will be still more strongly confirmed by evidence which will be produced in the following chapters. Had similar efforts been made forty or fifty years ago, to ascertain the views of physicians and others respecting the benefits or safety of excluding wine and other fermented drinks in the treatment of several diseases, in which not one in ten of our modern practitioners would now venture to use them, as well as among the healthy, I believe the results would have been of a very different character. The opinions, at least, of the physicians themselves, would