In addition to regulating people’s diet, Cheyne administered purges of vomiting and diarrhoea to cleanse the body, astringents to tighten up fibres and mercury to blast the obstructions in the vessels.57 Bathing and drinking in mineral springs helped to cleanse the body, and physical exercise cleared out all the glands and pores. With its inculcation of virtuous self-restraint and its mechanical logic, the vegetable diet became for Cheyne the perfect purification for both his glutted body and corrupt society as a whole.58
Cheyne was not the first to use dieting to cure the nation’s sorry medical record. In the 1670s Gideon Harvey recommended milk and vegetables as an antidote to England’s plague of scurvy and consumption caused by ‘flesh greediness’ among the populace.59 Alongside his discovery of nerves, Thomas Willis described the nervous disorders caused by laziness, gluttony and too much sex which blocked the nerves with ‘dregs or filthiness …[causing] Convulsions and painful wrinklings’ and recommended abstinent diets – including Cheyne’s favourite milk diet – as cures for them all.60 Much of Cheyne’s dietary autobiography even appears to have been plagiarised from a friend’s account of ‘the Milk Doctor of Croydon’ and Francis Fuller’s ‘account of my own distemper’ which concluded that many people ‘are by their Constitutions condemn’d to an Antediluvian Diet of Roots and Vegetables’.61 Cheyne was spearheading a widespread resuscitation of ancient dietary medicine, and like Hecquet he was hailed as the modern Hippocrates.62 But in contrast to most colleagues, Cheyne manipulated the ancients’ therapeutic dietetics and their warnings against intemperance into a specific stigmatisation of meat, which he then carried over from medicine into a vegetarian prophylactic guide to lifestyle.63
Although Cheyne sustained a base of scientific authority, many of his contemporaries lost patience with his equivocal claim that most people would be all right if they just ate a little less meat, and that they should only consider the vegetable diet as a last resort. They suspected that this was just a pose to conceal his dedication to vegetarianism, particularly as he invariably ended up pushing his patients into it anyway. Sick patients who read Cheyne’s works tended to assume that they were in need of the last resort and relinquished flesh of their own accord.64
Cheyne was certainly very persuasive. The Essex surgeon Silvanus Bevan, for example, read The English Malady and immediately considered taking up the milk diet to treat his chronic bouts of drowsiness. When he wrote to tell Cheyne that he found milk indigestible, Cheyne replied that he should try fruit and vegetables instead.65 When John Wesley stopped following Cheyne’s vegetable diet in order to avoid accusations of vegetarian heresy, Cheyne insisted that if he continued to eat meat he would be condemned to a plague of fevers for the rest of his life. Wesley fearfully obeyed and two years later told the Bishop of London that ‘since I have taken his advice, I have been free (blessed be God) from all bodily disorders.’66 Indeed, every one of Cheyne’s patients whose consultations with Cheyne have survived in manuscript letters were eventually reduced to the vegetable diet. Despite all his concessions to moderation, Cheyne was evidently committed to total vegetarianism.
Cheyne’s milk diet itself was a vegetarian ‘adaptation’ of an ancient remedy. In the first century AD Galen lauded the invigorating powers of drinking milk directly from a woman’s breasts, claiming that old men had been resuscitated by copulating with and ‘sucking a beautiful young nurse’.67 Suckling breast milk was still advocated by many in the medical profession, and the use of the animal milk diet had become popular – if controversial – by the 1660s.68 Thomas Sydenham, the most respected English doctor of the previous generation, recognised that the fad for the milk diet had been remarkably efficacious against hysterical women and gout, but warned that it was usually ‘much more injurious than beneficial’. It weakened the patient so much that they were no longer able to digest anything else, leaving them with the option of either worsening their condition, or sticking to the milk diet for the rest of their lives.69
But Cheyne had reinvented the milk diet as just another version of vegetarianism, and he skilfully turned these warnings to his own advantage. Having coerced his patients into adopting the milk and vegetable diet, he then forced them to stay on it on pain of death.70 He warned Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon (1707–91) against apostatising from her milk and vegetable regimen by reminding her that his friend Dr Taylor had ‘perished miserably’ when he succumbed after twenty-five years to eating meat.71 He used the same technique on Ann Hervey, the sickly daughter of the Earl of Bristol and goddaughter to the Princess of Wales (later Queen Caroline), who came to Bath in 1727 suffering from chronic fits, a paralysed right leg and arm, constant pain in the head, and slurred speech. Cheyne put her onto a milk and vegetable diet and terrified her so much that despite the entreaties of her family and their physician she absolutely refused to break his prescriptions. ‘She dares not think of changing anything in her present method,’ her mother lamented, ‘lest some relapse or check should happen by such alteration.’ Lady Bristol knew exactly who to blame: ‘The whole world is ready to pull [Cheyne] to pieces for so many miserable creatures that he has brought to death’s door,’ she raged.72
But Cheyne did not stop with Ann: he was already inflicting the same fate on Lord Hervey, her flamboyant brother. Hervey – with his frilly waistcoats, scarlet lipstick and face powder – was the darling of fashionable society. He shared a mistress with the Prince of Wales and lived openly with his homosexual partner in London, despite already being married. But his riotous life was beginning to take its toll: in addition to his chronic headaches, fever, fits and nervous delirium, he was slipping into a punishing addiction to opium.73 When Hervey read the Essay of Health and Long Life and came to purify himself at Bath in 1726, he and Cheyne formed an intimate friendship, both enjoying overt displays of their mutual sentimental dependence. Cheyne encouraged Hervey to treat him like a priest, and his patient responded by submitting himself entirely to Cheyne’s ‘sensible’ dietary religion.
Initially Cheyne assured Hervey that he would only have to abstain from meat for a few months, during which time he was ‘to eat no meat; and at the end of it to go into a total milk diet for two months’. But three years later, Cheyne had revealed his true colours by keeping poor Hervey from the tiniest morsel of flesh: ‘From the time of my first putting myself into his hands, to this hour,’ Hervey reported, ‘I ate neither flesh, fish, nor eggs, but lived entirely upon herbs, root, pulse, grains, fruits, legumes and all those sorts of foods.’74
Years later, when Hervey finally felt well enough to downgrade himself to Cheyne’s intermediate ‘trimming diet’ with its allowance of white tender meat, Cheyne felt utterly betrayed and erupted in wounded fury. Hervey rose to the occasion with paralleled melodrama, detailing in a letter to Cheyne his daily food intake precisely, claiming that he had overcome a sickness in a few days ‘that would have stuck by a true beef and pork-eater as many months’, and assuring Cheyne that he was still ‘one of your most pious votaries’:
If you were as just to my practice as I am to your doctrine, it would be impossible for you, whilst I always acknowledge and revere you as the great Aesculapius* of this age and country, to speak of me as an apostate, a heretic or even a schismatic in your medical religion … After this account of myself, I expect you should compare me no more to Mahomet’s Tomb, because I think my rigid perseverance in this faith entitles me, in the Heaven of Health, to the place immediately next to the Angel Gabriel.75
Cheyne’s contemporaries suspected that there was something going on beneath the surface of his ‘objective’ scientific call for vegetarianism. They were right, and towards the end of his career in 1740, Cheyne let down his guard, overcame his ‘Dread of the odious Designation of Enthusiasm or Superstition’, and revealed the theology behind his vegetarianism. Cheyne had always said that abstaining from meat was the cure for disease; but it transpired that it also worked the other way round: disease was really the cure for meat-eating. Cheyne be
lieved that vegetarianism reconnected people with nature. By renovating the nervous system and thus revitalising the neural function of ‘sympathy’, Cheyne thought that vegetarianism was a route to heaven. Alongside his role as dietician, Cheyne conceived of his entire professional life as a mission to save people’s souls through abstinence from flesh. His theological beliefs never took precedence over his scientific rationale, for he insisted, perfectly credibly, that it was his science that had led him to his theological deductions. If it was true that meat was bad for the health and vegetables good for it, God must necessarily have had reasons for making it so.76 Cheyne simply believed that he had discovered what God’s reasons were.
Cheyne believed that meat damaged the nervous system and the vegetable diet cleansed it. But nerves were not just physiological: they were also the vessels of morality. ‘Sympathy’ was a natural function of the nervous system which caused people to experience ‘the Misery of their Fellow Creatures’ and this was the physiological basis of social harmony.77
It did not take much imagination to extend this same principle to animals. In 1672 Thomas Willis showed that ‘four-footed Beasts’ had exactly the same nervous system as man – even their brains were only different in size.78 Bernard Mandeville noticed in the Fable of the Bees (1714) that this physiological similarity was why man naturally sympathised with terrestrial mammals ‘in whom the Heart, the Brain, and Nerves … the Organs of Sense, and consequently Feeling it self, are the same as they are in Human Creatures’.79 Even Nicolas Malebranche the Cartesian agreed that this was why inflicting pain on animals mechanically rebounded in ‘a Repurcussive stroke of Compassion’, making tender-hearted (and foolish) people ‘unable to see a Beast beaten, or hear it cry, without some disturbance of Mind’.80
For Cheyne, this natural propensity in the nerves to ‘sympathise’ with animal suffering was anatomical evidence that man was not designed to kill and eat them. Not only did humans lack carnivorous claws, teeth and guts, their entire nervous system was repulsed by killing. God gave man verbal permission to kill animals, but He also gave them the nervous organs and the sense of natural justice to tell them it was wrong. Cheyne took a radical step in allowing the physiological fact of sympathy to overrule the scriptural authority for eating meat. In this prioritisation of feeling in moral decision-making, Cheyne provided an anatomical basis for the claims of the ‘moral-sense’ philosophers Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and his one-time nervous patient David Hume (1711–76).81
Cheyne acknowledged that the ‘Custom’ of meat-eating had blunted natural human sensibilities:
To see the Convulsions, Agonies and Tortures of a poor Fellow-Creature, whom they cannot restore nor recompense, dying to gratify Luxury… must require a rocky Heart, and a great Degree of Cruelty and Ferocity. I cannot find on the Foot of natural Reason and Equity only, between feeding on human Flesh, and feeding on brute animal Flesh, except Custom and Example.82
Cheyne showed that eating meat physically stifled nervous sensations and thus apparently prevented the experience of sympathy. Meat built a wall – hardened by salts and oil – between man and his natural repulsion to flesh-eating. Cheyne’s vegetarian diet psychosomatically broke down that wall and reconnected man with his innate sympathy. ‘Custom’, or civilisation, had caused a breach between man and his nature: it was Cheyne’s aim to reunite them and show that meat-eating was a horrific contravention of natural sensibility. And sympathy, as he had always explained, was more than a matter of mere physical health: it was the body’s inbuilt mechanism for spiritual salvation.83
This prompted Cheyne to develop a bizarre reinterpretation of the Bible. He explained that God permitted meat after the Flood as a means of sorting the sheep from the goats. The voluptuous would gorge on it and consequently die quickly, clearing the world of their evil souls.84 The virtuous, however, would realise that meat caused disease and thus redeem themselves by abstaining.85 Whenever Cheyne’s patients became sick he told them that this was their ‘particular Call’ sent by God to initiate them ‘into a Low Diet’.86
This pious conviction made Cheyne’s friends chuckle into their sleeves. The poet and statesman Lord George Lyttelton wrote to Alexander Pope that Cheyne insisted that the sickness afflicting Lord George Grenville (who was to become George III’s Prime Minister) was ‘nothing but a fillip which Providence gave him, for his Good to make him temperate, and put him under the care of Doctor Cheyney. When we tell the Doctor, that he always has been temperate, a water Drinker; and eater of Whitemeats, he Roars like a Bull, and says we are all liars; for had he been so, he cou’d not have had an Inflammation, which he is ready to prove by all the Rules of Philosophy, mathematicks and religion.’87
Still more extraordinarily, Cheyne surmised that only those born with the highest ‘Degree of Sensibility’ ever suffered from nervous disorders, and thus only they would ever embrace the vegetable diet, ‘this (as it were) material Metaphysicks of a Regimen’.88 Others, in Cheyne’s words, were ‘unfit’ for the role.89 His insistence that an ordinary omnivorous diet was best for most people, especially ‘Ideots, Peasants and Mechanicks’, takes on a more sinister aspect as it appears that according to Cheyne’s semi-Calvinist vegetarian predestination, this essentially excluded them from virtue and even from heaven.90 No wonder Cheyne said that before his conversion to vegetarianism, he felt like a ‘Malefactor condemn’d’.91
According to Cheyne’s idiosyncratic system of salvation, which was very similar to that of the kabbalists and Platonists, all beings had committed a primeval sin of rebellion in a former existence.92 In punishment, they had been imprisoned as microscopic organisms in the testicles of the first male of each species.93 Those who failed to purify themselves would leave planet earth when they died and reincarnate in a ‘more gross, miserable and dark’ planet – perhaps even a burning hellish comet – until they were fully purged of all their wickedness.94 But those who took up Cheyne’s vegetarian ascetic principles made their bodies ‘lighter’ and detached their souls from the material world so that when they died their soul and its ethereal body would float up to a higher planet (by the power of electro-magnetic attraction) until eventually gravitating back to God.95 Indeed, Cheyne told his patients that the dietary purification was helping to purge the whole world’s ‘Load of Corruption, Deteriority, and Lapse’, thus paving the way towards the ultimate Golden Age of ‘Perfection’ or ‘universal Gaol delivery’ when all creatures would be released and return to God.96 Vegetarianism was a key to unclogging the human body as well as the whole universe’s system of spiritual purification.
This interplanetary cycle of reincarnation even included animals, which he tentatively suggested might be intelligent beings like humans on a lower rung of the purificatory ladder. Animals experienced pain and suffering and, he explained, ‘to me it seems utterly incredible, that any Creature, whether sentient or intelligent, should come into this State of Being and Suffering, for no other Purpose than we see them attain here … There must be some infinitely beautiful, wise and good Scene remaining for all sentient and intelligent Beings, the Discovery of which will ravish and astonish us one Day.’97 (According to Cheyne’s logic, this meant that God was not unjust for letting animals suffer and be killed, because it helped to ‘advance these Victims to a higher State of Being and Happiness’.98) Cheyne had devised the rudiments of this belief system right back in 1705 when he explained that sympathy was the principle by which all creatures in the interplanetary salvation system were united, and the means by which souls were attracted back to union with God.99
Cheyne’s system might look like a half-lunatic regression into kabbalistic mysticism, but in fact he could have taken half of it from the widely respected doctrine of Preformation devised by the leading German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had rationalised the kabbalism of his friend Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont. According to Leibniz, a sperm was a miniature version of the human body which ‘unfolded’ in the womb and grew into an adult orga
nism. When a person died, their bodies folded up again into their original microscopic size and awaited their turn for another birth.100 As for Cheyne’s belief in extra-terrestrial life, this was common among scientists and theologians at the time and there were even several others who believed in animal heaven.101 The bastion of the Newtonian-Anglican orthodoxy Samuel Clarke, for example, considered it possible that animal souls might be resurrected onto the planets.102 Cheyne was probably also encouraged by the French theosophist Charles Hector Marquis St George de Marsay, who, like Cheyne, thought suffering was a process of purification and that souls were guided to suitable planets or stars by mechanical attraction. Both of them in turn were probably influenced by the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686–1743), founder of French Freemasonry, who reputedly believed that ‘there’s an eternal pre-existence of souls; that the bad supply the world of brutes’.103 Such beliefs might seem strange, but the status of animals and how to make sense of God allowing them to suffer simply for our pleasure was a serious problem for Christians.
Although for Cheyne this eschatological theory always simmered beneath the surface of his dietary prescriptions, he knew better than to divulge it at all times. Instead he stuck for the most part to the physical rationale for vegetarianism. His ideas about man’s natural sympathy for creatures spread by means of his own books, and those of his illustrious patients and readers, providing scientific backing for Europe’s ensuing ‘back-to-nature’ movement. His belief that abstaining from flesh cleansed the nerves, reawakened the innate force of sympathy, absolved the stricken conscience and facilitated the sympathetic attraction of the soul back to God, may seem alien today. But much of Enlightenment science was originally backed up and motivated by such beliefs, and they have thus, surprisingly, contributed to modern notions about the moral and physiological implications of meat.
The Bloodless Revolution Page 23
