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

the stomach and to the general system. In the treatment of gout, Dr. Cullen recommends a course like that which has been stated, except that instead of proposing vegetable food as a means of cure, he recommends it as _preventive_. He says-- "The gout may be entirely prevented by constant bodily exercise, and by a low diet; and I am of opinion that this prevention may take place even in persons who have a hereditary disposition to the disease. I must add, here, that even when the disposition has discovered itself by severe paroxysms of inflammatory gout, I am persuaded that labor and abstinence will absolutely prevent any returns of it for the rest of life." Again, in reference to the same subject, he thus observes: "I am firmly persuaded that any man who, early in life, will enter upon the constant practice of bodily labor and of abstinence from animal food, will be preserved entirely from the disease." And yet once more. "If an abstinence from animal food be entered upon early in life, while the vigor of the system is yet entire, I have no doubt of its being both safe and effectual." To guard against the common opinion that by vegetable food, he meant raw, or crude, or bad vegetables, Dr. C. explains his meaning by assuring the reader that by a vegetable diet he means the "farinaceous seeds," and "milk;" and admits that green, crude, and bad vegetables are not only less useful, but actually liable to produce the very diseases, which good, mealy vegetable food will prevent or cure. This is an important distinction. Many a person, who wishes to be abstemious, seems to think that if he only abstains from flesh and fish, that is enough. No matter, he supposes, what vegetables he uses, so they are vegetables; nor how much he abuses himself by excess in quantity. Nay, he will even load his stomach with milk, or butter, or eggs; sometimes with fish (we have often been asked if we considered fish as animal food); and sometimes, worse still, with hot bread, hot