The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

Hecquet also said that animal fat blocked the lymph and clogged the porosity of the body’s membranes. Bellini had emphasised the necessity of maintaining the ductility of the body’s fibres – especially those of the nerves and the blood vessels – and Hecquet warned that eating too much flesh caused the fibres to stiffen, hindering circulation. Feed your body on flesh (or wine), warned Hecquet, and the disruption to the flow of vital fluids would be sure to result in ‘inflammatory diseases’.34

  The mechanical school also revolutionised the understanding of the digestive system. Whereas the traditional school of iatrochemists held that foods were ‘fermented’ by acids in the stomach, the mechanists argued that digestion was conducted by grinding and crushing. In his lectures at the prestigious University of Leiden, Pitcairne instigated a European-wide controversy by adopting this new theory of digestion. Hecquet stuck his neck out by publishing a paper defending Pitcairne’s theory, earning himself numerous enemies but also many friends who hailed him as the greatest medic in France and the ‘Reliever of Mankind’.35 His private correspondence with Pitcairne and numerous other medics of the day demonstrates how embroiled he became in the European-wide dispute.36

  Hecquet explained that the process of grinding began in the mouth where the jaws acted like two natural millstones. In the stomach, food was crushed by the surrounding muscles, a force that Pitcairne had calculated to total an incredible 461,219 pounds. This grinding was assisted by villi on the inside of the gut, the ‘million motorised fibres’, which crushed and kneaded the food like so many kitchen hands, making it ‘dissolve, melt, & pass into a fine & delicate cream’. This creamy substance, called ‘chyle’, entered the lymphatic system where it was distilled and used to create new blood.

  The food that could be ground most easily into smooth, homogeneous pulp was, declared Hecquet, ‘man’s most natural diet’. Fat, unctuous, fibrous, globular flesh was clearly resistant, and thus, Hecquet considered, the matter rested: ‘From this without doubt one perceives already what sort of foods are preferable to man; they will not be the flesh of animals, but … seeds and grains,’ which have a ‘tendency to melt into a milky juice’.37

  Having placed the action of grinding at the centre of the body’s health, the old argument about comparative anatomy took on new significance. Needless to say, Hecquet sided with Gassendi in concluding that ‘The disposition of [men’s] teeth have destined them to crush nothing but fruits, grains, or plants.’ It was therefore ‘beyond doubt that man was made to live and nourish himself from the fruits of the earth’.38

  Not only was eating meat unhealthy, immoral and unnatural, said Hecquet, it was also disgusting and inefficient. Vegetables were the primary source of nutrition, ‘like virgin juices’, so why eat animals, he demanded, when they were just made up of ‘second-hand’ pre-digested vegetables, coming ‘as if with a stain of prostitution … by the different uses which they have had to suffer before arriving at the human body’?39

  If, on all this evidence, Hecquet could not get the whole world to relinquish flesh absolutely, like François Bernier, at the very least he wanted doctors to stop trying to ‘feed up’ the sick on concentrated meat broths. Convalescent foods should be as similar to chyle as possible, he said, which meant nothing stronger than oat broths and moistened bread.40

  In regarding abstinent dieting as the key to treating sickness, Hecquet was resurrecting the therapeutic tradition of the ancient medics Hippocrates, Galen and Asclepiades, who had consistently prescribed the cooling, fleshless diet to allay the heat of fever and restore humoural imbalances. The first-century AD physician Galen had dedicated entire works to the ptisan, or barley broth: every disease had its own special diet, and it was the duty of the physician to prescribe and enforce it.

  According to Hecquet, a core of sixteenth-century French physicians had begun to revive ancient dietary medicine, but it was still only used for a few diseases; he earned himself the title ‘l’Hippocrate de France’, by wishing to bring diet back to the heart of medical practice. But it was perhaps more of a hijack than a renaissance, because Hecquet’s main point was to extrapolate (as St Jerome had) that if the ‘slender diet’ was good for the sick, it must also be good for the healthy.41

  Eleven years after Hecquet first published a full-length diatribe against eating flesh, a Scottish doctor based in England started to publish his own ideas about the utility of the fleshless diet in medicine. This man, Dr George Cheyne, was swiftly becoming a prodigy in the British medical world, and by 1724, with the publication of his Essay of Health and Long Life, Cheyne had established himself as the authority on the prophylactic vegetable diet. His work went through three French translations and circulated in Latin as well.

  Hecquet came upon Cheyne’s work and immediately recognised a brother-in-arms. Cheyne, like Hecquet, was an avid iatromechanist, who had in fact been taught by (and was a personal friend of) Pitcairne. Hecquet’s major work, La Médecine Théologique, was filled with enthusiastic allusions to ‘the savant Mr Cheyne’ and in 1733, the year of Cheyne’s next major work, The English Malady, Hecquet formally hailed Cheyne as his own English counterpart. While Hecquet cast himself as the foremost promulgator of Hippocratic dietary medicine in France, he said that the neglected art ‘has just been skilfully resuscitated in the Medicine of England, by the excellent Work of one of their illustrious Masters [Dr Cheyne]’. Despite his pointed priority claim, Hecquet followed everything ‘this skilful Doctor’ had to say, and even adapted his own physiological system at the tail end of his career to incorporate Cheyne’s focus on the effect of meat on the nervous system. He even began to clamp down on fish-eating, which his Catholic bias had always caused him to regard as harmless.42

  The recognition of their joint aims constitutes something of a medical vegetarian movement in Europe, dating from the 1730s. It was the aim of this loosely connected brotherhood to promote vegetarianism through the discourse of dietary medicine, and, it was phenomenally successful. Most doctors who thought that the vegetable diet was a useful medical therapy did not agree that vegetarianism was the best diet for everyone, but a number – sometimes inadvertently – adopted elements of the vegetarian ideology.

  Joining forces with Cheyne, Hecquet envisaged an international research project that would prove once and for all that abstaining from flesh increased health and longevity. Cheyne was already cataloguing statistical evidence that vegetarians lived to ages of well over a hundred, a project that had been crystallised in 1635 when William Harvey conducted the autopsy of a celebrated farmer called Thomas Parr, and concluded that he had lived for 152 years and 9 months largely thanks to his Pythagorean frugality.43 In addition to such local instances, Hecquet felt that the innumerable vegetarian peoples all over the world were living empirical proof. The Tartars, the Irish, the Scottish, ‘and all the Northerners who eat little or no meat’ were just the beginning:

  if one joins to them most of the Orientals, who live on hardly more than rice, and a quantity of peoples, even our neighbours, like the Spanish, the Italians, and those who live in Languedoc and Provence, among whom the use of meat is just about only used by the privileged, who besides eat it very soberly: one will acknowledge that this custom is not at all so natural to man, nor so necessary as we usually claim, because so much of the world do without it … even among the nations where meat is more common, most of the girls, women, children, poor, artisans and all the country people hardly ever eat it, and they prefer fruits, milk foods & pastries. If one remarks finally … that all the reformers of paganism, legislators, priests, philosophers, without counting the Brahmins of today, who are the priests of the Indians, so many thousands of monks, hermits, holy men and women, and people of every sex and condition, who strictly abstain from meat: we will admit without trouble that there are at least as many people who live and maintain themselves well without living on meat, as there are who believe it necessary.44

  The obvious deduction to make from this welter of evidence, Hecquet concluded, was t
hat ‘A sentiment so universally received, cannot but come from the foundation of nature itself.’ Following a similar line of thought to Newton, though in a more cavalier fashion, Hecquet claimed that vegetarianism had spread out culturally with the migration of peoples ever since Noah’s Flood, and also that God had imprinted it as an innate part of human nature: ‘une impression innée & universellement répanduë dans les esprits’.45

  And yet the best was still to come. A new group of healthy herb-eaters were forming a groundswell of vegetarianism. Triumphantly, Hecquet announced that ‘either by virtue, or by natural disposition, or by indisposition caused & and brought on by infirmity, there are today even more persons who eat nothing but meagre foods.’ Among these he included patients such as his own, suffering from diseases that could only be cured by abstaining ‘totalement de viande & du vin’, and, best of all, those who voluntarily shunned meat for ‘the love of health’.46 Hecquet was the pastoral physician guiding mankind back to the natural diet.

  Hecquet believed that his physiological evidence that meat was unhealthy proved that all the old theological arguments for vegetarianism were true. That meat clogged the system surely implied that God made man to live on fruit and herbs? The microscope had revealed the truth of St Jerome’s claim that God’s permission to eat meat was a grudging concession, and even substantiated Cheyne’s novel theory that God allowed people meat on purpose to shorten their lives. Thus, it was not just more healthy to abstain from meat, it was also more virtuous.47

  Many of Hecquet’s colleagues at the Faculty of Medicine were delighted that he had ‘solidly established & proved’ that Lenten food was suitable to human nature. Others in the medical establishment were less impressed and accused him of heresy, scandal and blinkered science.48 He was clearly one of the Gassendist vegetarians addressed by Louis Lémery.49 Nicolas Andry de Boisregard, Master of the Faculty of Medicine, published a tract which lamented that many people held views like Hecquet, and answered him point by point. Andry cast doubt over Hecquet’s biblical interpretations and, as a dedicated iatrochemist, refuted the scientific basis of Hecquet’s mechanical theory of digestion.

  Hecquet was wrong for two reasons, argued Andry. First because tender meat was much easier to crush and grind ‘than cod, salmon, oysters, roots, and many other similar foods which the Author recommends so forcibly in his Treatise. Second, because it is not in the slightest bit true that digestion is carried out by crushing.’ How, asked Andry, could the thin wall of a snake’s stomach digest the bones of a frog by crushing and grinding? How could berries pass whole through the guts of a man if such a lot of pressure were being exerted on the stomach? How could inhalation and exhalation occur if the muscles of the diaphragm and belly were squeezing the stomach simultaneously? No, said Andry, the old model of digestion by fermentation was the only way to explain these anomalies and it made a nonsense of Hecquet’s claims about the difficulty of digesting meat.

  Hecquet’s comparative anatomy was likewise flawed, Andry argued; for as Aristotle had observed, humans had the universal organ, the hand, with which they made knives and performed the art of cooking. And besides, human teeth were not capable of grinding grains – hence the use of flour mills and ovens to make bread.50

  Like other vegetarians, Hecquet was also open to satire for his moral extremism. In 1715 the playwright and novelist Alain-René Lesage satirised Hecquet in his picaresque novel The Adventures of Gil Blas. The Hecquet caricature, Dr Sangrado, is called upon to treat the gouty gourmand Canon Sedillo:

  ‘Pray, what is your ordinary diet?’ asked Sangrado; ‘My usual food,’ replied the Canon, ‘is broth and juicy meat.’ ‘Broth and juicy meat!’ cried the doctor, alarmed. ‘I do not wonder to find you sick; such dainty dishes are poisoned pleasure and snares that luxury spreads for mankind, so as to ruin them the more effectually … What an irregularity is here! what a frightful regimen! You ought to have been dead long ago. How old are you, pray?’ ‘I am in my sixty-ninth year,’ replied the Canon. ‘Exactly,’ said the physician; ‘an early old age is always the fruits of intemperance. If you had drunk nothing else than pure water all your life, and had been satisfied with simple nourishment – such as boiled apples, for example – you would not now be tormented with the gout, and all your limbs would perform their functions with ease.’51

  In 1726, at the age of sixty-five, Hecquet was yearning once again to retire from the fleshly world and he accepted accommodation with the religious Carmelites of Faubourg Saint-Jacques, where he had been a practising doctor for thirty years. He continued writing up to his death, never retreating from his vegetarian idealism, and corresponding with the most prestigious doctors of Europe. He died in 1737 and was buried in the church of the Carmelites where a Latin epitaph testified to his success in unifying theology and medicine.52

  THIRTEEN

  Dr Cheyne’s Sensible Diet

  George Cheyne (1671–1743) was the most influential vegetarian in eighteenth-century Britain. He provided a novel scientific explanation for the effects of food on the body that shaped much eighteenth-century dietary medicine and contributed to modern ideas of diet. Unlike his censorious French counterpart, Philippe Hecquet, however, Cheyne brilliantly concocted his medical arguments into an appealing recipe which pandered to the tastes of his clientele. Combined with his notorious Scottish wit, this allowed him to push his reforms while remaining widely popular. He treated a variety of establishment figures, including Alexander Pope, and converted many others – notably the novelist Samuel Richardson – to his vegetarian creed. By the end of the century King George III (1738–1820) was lampooned as Cheyne’s frugal follower and the Prime Minister had come under his sway. Astoundingly, this evangelist of abstinence was also a behemoth of obesity. His bulky frame was recognised by everyone in society and it was the target of many a satirical dart.

  One can picture Cheyne occupying his corner in the coffee-house, ranting against gluttony. The paradox of this puritanical Falstaff provided sheer amusement to his contemporaries: his friend and patron Lord Bolingbroke wrote comically that the portly Dr Cheyne, ‘with a gallon of milk coffee, and five pounds of Biscuit before him at Breakfast, declaimed to [Alexander] Pope, and me, against the enormous immorality of using exercise to promote an appetite’.1 The poet and dramatist Edward Young laughed at the contradictions in Cheyne’s comportment in his ‘Epistle to Mr Pope’:

  ‘Who’s this with nonsense would restrain?

  Who’s this’, they say, ‘so vainly schools the vain?

  Who damns our trash, with so much trash replete?’

  As, three ells2 round, huge Cheyne rails at meat.

  One satirist taunted Cheyne as a Pharisaic bellygod: ‘oh rare Doctor – I would fain learn, if Bag-Pipe Cheeks … Double Tripe Chin or Pot-Gut Belly, are the consequences of this regulated Diet?’ Even his friends, like Pope, who said, ‘There was not an honester man nor a truer philosopher,’ joked about the swelling of Cheyne’s girth; John Gay, author of The Beggar’s Opera (1728), commemorated him as ‘Cheney huge of size’; and the poet James Thomson chimed in with the proverbial ‘Great fat Doctor of Bath’.3

  George Cheyne (1671–1743)

  But to Cheyne – who spent his life fighting desire with self-denial – his size was anything but hilarious. He had come to London from Scotland in 1701, a fresh-faced twenty-nine-year-old, confident that he would establish his fame as a Newtonian mathematician and Pitcairnian physician. But in the metropolis, where consumer goods were available in an abundance virtually unknown elsewhere in the world, the ‘great Temperance’ he claimed to have pursued in his youth was replaced with gut-expanding excess and debauchery: ‘and thus,’ he related years later, ‘constantly Dineing and Supping in Taverns, and in the Houses of my Acquaintances of Taste and Delicacy, my Health was in a few Years brought into great Distress … I grew excessively fat, short-breath’d, Lethargic and Listless.’4

  In fact, Cheyne was renowned as a drunken fatso before he even left Scotland: his r
ival, Charles Oliphant, who knew him as a personal tutor, maligned his character with stories of his ‘unwieldy Carcass’ reeling home after nightly binges, full of ‘nauseous Loads … which he often, to the scandal of the Whole family, disgorged in his Pupil’s Bosom’.5 But Cheyne’s fable about the horrendous effects of London luxury (which he wrote about in his autobiographical essay ‘The Case of the Author’) was not just exaggeration or excuse: Cheyne was translating his physical demise into a moral-medical theory of which his own suffering body was the prime clinical example.

  He described himself as ‘a putrified overgrown Body from Luxury and perpetual Laziness, scorbutical all over’. The corruption visited on his body was a symptom of wider society’s sickness. The faecal build-up in urban spaces seemed to be mapped onto his legs as they erupted in pus-oozing ulcers; grocer’s shops were stuffed with cognac and pâté, clogging his veins with morbid matter; the capital swollen with imported delicacies reflected his ever growing paunch. His body grew and grew, reaching at its maximum an incredible thirty-four stone. He dubbed himself the fattest man in Europe.6

  As the fat built up, Cheyne’s hopes of fame started to crumble. After a catastrophic falling-out with Isaac Newton over their work on the calculus, which ended in furious mutual accusations of plagiarism, Cheyne’s nerves began to falter.7 Within a few years of arriving in London, he was suffering from an intermittent fever, a permanent headache, trembling and morbid anxiety. Eventually, he wrote in his clinical autobiography, ‘I was suddenly seized with a vertiginous Paroxysm, so extreamly frightful and terrible, as to approach near to a Fit of an Apoplexy, and I was forced in it to lay hold on the Posts of my Bed, for fear of tumbling out.’8 His sickness and moroseness drove away his old ‘Bottle-Companions’, and Cheyne, left in loneliness, plunged headlong into physical and mental collapse.9