The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  Even the poet William Cowper (1731–1800), adored by Romantic nature-lovers and called vegetarian by modern scholars,30 really belongs with the counter-vegetarians. His lengthy masterpiece, The Task (1785), which became one of the most popular poems in England, is replete with imprecations against cruelty, empathy for wild animals, and appeals to the primeval law of ‘universal love’. With typical sentimentality, Cowper wrote:

  I would not enter on my list of friends

  (Though grac’d with polish’d manners and fine sense

  Yet wanting sensibility) the man

  Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.31

  His private letters, meanwhile, testify to the intensity of his sympathy for animals. When Cowper’s mental health declined into total breakdown, it was to his pet birds, hares, cats and dogs that he turned in his convalescence.32 He idealised the frugal meals of the peasantry, occasionally dieted on milk to combat his illness,33 and translated John Milton’s Latin Ode to Christ’s Nativity, which recommended that divine poets should live on a Pythagorean diet.34 But there is no evidence in his letters that he ever abstained from meat on moral principle, and like the others he directed his protest not against death but on adding ‘tenfold bitterness to death by pangs/ Needless’:

  On Noah, and in him on all mankind,

  The charter was conferr’d by which we hold

  The flesh of animals in fee, and claim

  O’er all we feed on, pow’r of life and death.

  …

  The sum is this: if man’s convenience, health,

  Or safety interfere, his rights and claims

  Are paramount, and must extinguish theirs.35

  The anti-slavery poet Samuel Jackson Pratt (1749–1814) has likewise been hailed as an advocate of vegetarianism. Emulating Cowper, he celebrated the vegetarian benevolence of the great prison-reformer John Howard, and in his poem Humanity, or the Rights of Nature (1788) he praised the uncultured Brahmins who ‘refuse the worm to kill’. But he emphatically denied that Indian vegetarianism suited Europe’s ‘cultur’d state’, and echoing Cowper and Pope he restricted himself to criticism of the ‘ling’ring death’:

  Live, tho’ thou do’st on blood, ah! still refrain,

  To load thy victims with superfluous pain;36

  It has also been claimed that the eighteenth-century women poets – in particular Ann Yearsley ‘the Bristol Milkwoman’, Anna Seward, Ann Finch and Anna Laetitia Barbauld – teamed up in sympathy for animals against male oppressors in a defiant and exclusively female way. Perhaps the men poets Thomson, Pope and Cowper had these women in mind when they marshalled their sentimental backlash against excessive sympathy for animals – and it is no doubt true that women, who were seen as pertaining more to the body and less to the spirit, were believed to experience the corporal function of sympathy more intensely. But even the women poets avoid the extreme of vegetarianism or attributing to animals an absolute right to life. Yearsley lamented the wanton murder of a robin, but (entirely in line with male authors) she had nothing to say about the sheep and cows destined for slaughter; Barbauld objected to the unnecessary cruelty wreaked on a mouse, not its execution as such; and Seward’s cat dreamed of its own cat heaven – but it was a heaven that explicitly endorsed the killing of weaker animals. The line they drew between legitimate and illegitimate killing seems to be much the same as that of their male contemporaries.37

  The sentimental novelists Sarah Scott and Lady Barbara Montagu emulated Rousseau and Richardson in many ways, but subverted Rousseau’s radical stance on animals. The utopian community of women in their co-authored novel Millenium Hall (1762) is furnished with an animal sanctuary just like Rousseau’s Julie, where animals ‘live so unmolested, that they seem to have forgot all fear, and rather to welcome than flee from those who come amongst them’. However, the heroine, Mrs Maynard, insists that ‘I imagine man has a right to use the animal race for his own preservation, perhaps for his convenience, but certainly not to treat them with wanton cruelty.’ Their sanctuary is a purely sentimental evocation of Thomson’s Golden Age when man and beast ‘walked joint tenant of the shade’, for in another part of the estate they have poultry, pigeons, deer, fish, hares and rabbits destined to supply their table with ‘as much venison as we can use’. The women tick the box of sensibility towards animals without giving up eating flesh.38

  A young lady in Mary Deverell’s Miscellanies (1781) also adopts the moral high ground against luxury when a doctor prescribes her an abstemious vegetable diet; but she denies she has ethical motives, and doubts she will keep up vegetarianism once her health recovers. It is her young male acquaintance who has confined ‘himself to a vegetable Diet, on Pythagoric Principles’:

  Humanely wise, abhorring bloody feasts,

  Where useful are devoure’d by useless beasts …

  Nor shall the sightly view of butter’d veal,

  Make him his abstemious resolution reel;

  But the tone is cajoling and even this panegyric literature could undermine the viability of vegetarianism by confining it to Ovidian fantasy rather than practical reality.39

  It seems that most women, at least, followed the rules laid down by their society. Enforcing this was the purpose of many educational treatises of the period. Erasmus Darwin’s Plan for the Conduct of Female Education (Derby, 1797), for example, explained that sympathy was the foundation of the law ‘to do as you would be done by’. ‘This compassion, or sympathy with the pains of others, ought also to extend to the brute creation,’ said Darwin. But, he insisted (clearing up any lingering misunderstanding of Rousseau’s animal rights theories), it should only be taken ‘as far as our necessities will permit; for we cannot exist long without the destruction of other animal or vegetable beings … Hence, from the preservation of our existence we may be supposed to have a natural right to kill those brute creatures, which we want to eat’.40 As he had already warned in Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life (1794–6), ‘This sympathy, with all sensitive beings, has been carried so far by some individuals, and even by whole tribes, as the Gentoos, as not only to restrain them from killing animals for their support, but even to induce them to permit insects to prey upon their bodies.’ People had to be taught to balance the law of sympathy with the knowledge that ‘the first law of nature is, ‘‘Eat or be eaten.’’ ‘41

  In the sentimental society of the eighteenth century (just like today’s) there was nothing unusual about making elaborate displays of sympathy for animals – fawning over rabbits, lambs or pigeons – and in the next moment devouring the same species of animal at table. As the Brahmin-loving Chinese character Lien Chi Altangi in Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762) exclaims of his European hosts, ‘Strange contrariety of conduct! They pity, and they eat the objects of their compassion!’42

  As pets – from mollycoddled poodles to caged canaries – became part of popular culture in the eighteenth century, so farm animals became industrialised as the demand for them burgeoned with affluence. Cruelty exercised in the production of food continued and even increased. Georgians had their abattoirs in the open air, right at the point of retail. The sight of slaughter, the smell of blood and the shrieking of animals in their dying moments were familiar experiences to city-dwellers. As professions of sympathy for animals escalated, so pressure grew for slaughterhouses to move indoors and out of town. Eventually this is what happened (also thanks to economic industrialisation and urban hygiene initiatives), thus pushing the unpleasant aspect of the meat industry out of sight and mind.

  Cheyne had tried and Rousseau was desperately trying to force people to realise that their sentimental feelings were at odds with the processes of production behind the items they consumed. But most of culture’s inscribers were quite happy with the consumer’s distance from the producer and vehemently protected themselves from inconvenient moral injunctions. Because most consumers were the sort of ‘silly soul’ whom Mandeville, Richardson and Coleridge reviled, sentimentalism had litt
le beneficial effect for animals. Inflicting pain on animals for the sake of amusement (rather than gastronomic pleasure) was eventually outlawed in 1822, and the working-class blood sports, cock-fighting, dog-fighting, and bear-and badger-baiting, were suppressed (though the upper-class stag- and fox-hunting were to enjoy a reprieve until 2004).43 But then as now, the anti-cruelty movement was largely a distraction from the fundamental issue of meat consumption. Urban dwellers were vehement critics of cruelty inflicted for the sake of entertainment, but quite happy for animals to suffer for the pleasures of the table. Meat-eaters drew attention away from the moral implications of their consumption by protesting against what they deemed to be ‘unnecessary’ suffering. The potential challenge to meat-eating posed by sympathy was effectively averted. This situation survives intact today and has its roots in the sentimental culture of the eighteenth century.

  * * *

  *Sewing up their eyes in fattening chambers. Plutarch complains about this.

  SEVENTEEN

  Antonio Cocchi and the Cure for Scurvy

  The Florentine physician Antonio Cocchi (1695–1758) was the highest-standing professional advocate of vegetarianism in eighteenth-century Europe, and he avoided censure by grounding his arguments in nutritional evidence. Professor of Medicine at Pisa and of Anatomy at Florence, court antiquarian to Francis I of Tuscany, innovative curator of the Uffizi Gallery, member of both the Florentine College of Physicians and the Royal Society of London, Cocchi was in a prime position to propagate his views.1 His most famous work, Del Vitto Pitagorico per uso della Medicina (Florence, 1743), was reprinted several times in Italy, translated into English as The Pythagorean Diet, of Vegetables Only (1745), into French in 1750, and later into German. Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered Cocchi the greatest authority on vegetarianism, and in Émile he referred his readers to the Vitto Pitagorico and the counter-vegetarian work of Cocchi’s opponent, Giovanni Bianchi.2

  After making friends with the 9th and 10th Earls of Huntingdon in Florence, Cocchi returned with them to England where he remained for three or four years from 1723. Falling in love with the country, in 1727 he wrote to the Marchese Scaramuccia Visconti in the typical vein of European Anglomania, saying that ‘A man who has spent some time there is spoilt for ever, unless he settles there.’ During his residence in England Cocchi cultivated contacts with the elderly Isaac Newton and with the prominent iatromechanists John Freind and Richard Mead, both of whom knew George Cheyne. Cocchi was corresponding with the Earls of Huntingdon at the same time that Cheyne was treating Selina, the Countess of Huntingdon, and Cheyne’s Essay of Health and Long Life came out in 1724 while Cocchi was in the country. Cocchi became convinced of the powers of vegetarianism when, in 1727, he cured a gouty patient in London by instructing him to keep the ‘indestructible’ salts of flesh out of his diet. From that moment on Cocchi became a proselyte of the medical vegetarian movement initiated by Cheyne and Hecquet.3 In his treatise Eccessiva Grassezza (Excessive Fatness) Cocchi championed Cheyne who had, he said, ‘una corpulenza che lo rendeva immobile’ (a corpulence that rendered him immobile) until he adopted the diet ‘totalmente vegetabile’.4

  As a medical mechanist, Cocchi considered himself a follower of Cheyne’s tutor, Archibald Pitcairne, and he edited the works of the Italian iatromechanical master, Lorenzo Bellini.5 Like his forebears in dietary medicine, Cocchi put a new spin on the vegetable diet to legitimise it by the rigorous standards of contemporary science. He wished to dissociate vegetarianism from the shady recesses of eccentricity, radicalism and superstition, and to reconstitute it as an Enlightenment ideal. He therefore completely ignored the biblical basis for vegetarianism and established his arguments on the firmest scientific observations. Despite the anti-vegetarian conclusions of Tyson and Wallis, Cocchi claimed that they had demonstrated that the human gut was herbivorous: ‘such Animals as feed on vegetable Diet,’ he reiterated, ‘are furnish’d with a Gut Colon, whereof most of the Carnivorous are destitute.’ Drawing on the chemical school of medicine, Cocchi explained that vegetables were rich in ‘fixed’ acid salts – so called because they did not evaporate when heated; meat, by contrast, was high in ‘volatile’ alkaline salts which, Cocchi warned, turned into venomous vapour when heated in the body. Acidity made vegetables a great solvent and therefore easy to digest, whereas the oily ‘saponaceous’ substance in meat could create glutinous blockages and separation in the blood. Taking a cue from Cheyne, Cocchi claimed that vegetables could cure nervous disorders from rheumatism to melancholy as well as being effective against consumption, aneurisms, clogging of the vessels and scurvy.6

  For someone who was trying to free vegetarianism from the stigma of superstition, The Pythagorean Diet may seem like an odd title. But Cocchi’s premise was that Pythagoras had never believed any of the ‘false’ superstitions about reincarnation. On the contrary, Pythagoras’ vegetarianism had been motivated by the most enlightened scientific understanding of diet and nutrition: ‘His Doctrine of the Transmigration of Souls was only a specious Reason to make his medical Advice go down with the People,’ Cocchi declared, citing the ancient testimony of Diogenes Laertius to back up his opinion. Vegetables were easy to grow, suppressed noxious desires when eaten, created tranquillity of mind and harmonised the body’s humours: Pythagoras, Cocchi insisted, ‘had Health principally in View’.7

  Vegetarians throughout the world bore testimony to the healthiness of vegetarianism. Countering the assumption that vegetables did not supply enough strength (and ignoring the Indians who had acquired a reputation for feebleness), Cocchi attributed the health of the Tuscan poor to the ready availability of fresh Mediterranean vegetables.8 The vigorous mountain-dwelling people of Europe, he added, live only on milk and herbs ‘and the Japanese (who are very resolute in despising Dangers, and even Death itself) abstain from all animal Food’.9 As the crowning proof of these generalisations, he presented himself, his wife, his daughter and son, Raimondo, who all allegedly lived according to Cocchi’s Pythagorean Diet and were perpetually in good health.10

  Vegetarianism was the result of the most enlightened scientific knowledge. It was also, Cocchi insisted, in line with the most enlightened morality. Pythagoras’ protection of animals, he said, was motivated by the innocent curiosity of a ‘true Naturalist’ and by humane principles ‘so contrary to the childish, restless, and destructive Inclination … of pulling to Pieces and spoiling, for the most trifling Purposes, the beautiful and useful Productions of Nature’.11 Cocchi imagined that vegetarianism would physiologically purify the human faculty of sense: ‘any one who restrains himself, for a long time from Wine, and season’d Meats, will acquire a most exquisite Delicacy and distinguishing Sense of Tasting.’ Echoing Cheyne’s idea that vegetarians were part of a sensible elite, Cocchi claimed that they were the most enlightened, educated, ‘ingenious’ beings at the summit of European society.12

  In England Cocchi was initiated into the Freemasons, and in 1732 helped to establish the first Masonic Lodge in Florence. Freemasonry was widespread in Enlightenment Europe, and many of the prominent thinkers of the period counted themselves members of this antique society. Priding themselves on modern principles of open-mindedness and liberty, the Freemasons also venerated the ancient learning of Pythagoras and the Egyptians.

  Most Masonic history remains shrouded in secrecy, but Cocchi left to posterity a unique manuscript diary called ‘Effemeridi’, the first document written in defence of Masonry by an Italian. Cocchi traced an inheritance of Pythagorean philosophy from ancient Egypt through to the Pythagorean colony in Italy and ultimately to Galileo’s revival of heliocentrism and his own vegetarianism. This line of thinking (shared by his associate Isaac Newton) was typical of the Masonic belief that the ancients held pristine wisdom which it was modern man’s duty to rediscover. It seems that vegetarianism, for Cocchi, was part of a fusion between ancient knowledge, modern science and enlightened morality, which were all part of one syncretic episteme. There are tantalising scraps
of evidence which suggest that many Freemasons shared Cocchi’s view on their vegetarian heritage.13

  Cocchi (renowned as a classical scholar as well as a physician14) conceived of himself, like Hecquet and Cheyne, as participating in a Europe-wide revival of ancient dietary medicine. To advance the cause he wrote a biography of Asclepiades, the first-century BC Greek physician of Rome who frequently prescribed abstinence from flesh to his patients.15 Citing Hippocrates, Pliny, Aretaeus and Celsus as intermediaries, Cocchi traced the medical use of the vegetable diet right back to Pythagoras. It had ‘remain’d neglected for so many Ages, thro’ a fatal Inadvertency’, he announced in his Pythagorean Diet, ‘till in this happy Age it was at last again brought into the Use of philosophical Medicine’.16 He attributed the modern revival of medical vegetarianism to the discovery that the milk diet cured gout and rheumatism in ‘about the Middle of last Century, by the Sagacity and Experience of a gouty Physician of Paris’ (possibly François Bernier). This discovery had been substantiated by Johann Georg Greisel’s Tractatus medicus de Cura lactis in Arthritide (1670), and had been confirmed by Dr Francis Slare’s experiments in England. Making the same extrapolation as Cheyne, he explained that it was thanks to the esteem for the milk diet that ‘the like Reputation was there at last extended to all Sorts of vegetable Diet’.17