The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  By the early eighteenth century Britons were tired of travelling all the way to Germany for a decent medical education, and in 1726 Edinburgh University finally opened the doors of its new medical faculty, destined to become the centre of academic medicine in Britain. Originally dreamed of in 1705 by Cheyne and Pitcairne as part of their abortive ambition to reform medicine,17 the Edinburgh medical school self-consciously founded its curriculum on Boerhaave’s Leiden model. The lecturers used his and Haller’s textbooks as guides to their own teaching and, despite Haller’s apostasy from Boerhaave’s credo, Edinburgh became the headquarters of medical vegetarianism.

  The first Lecturer in Anatomy, Alexander Monro (who had been sent to train under Boerhaave in Leiden by his father John, himself a Leiden graduate), announced his allegiance to the vegetarian side of the debate in his seminal Essay on Comparative Anatomy (1744). To the dismay of Buffon’s counter-vegetarian followers on the Continent, Monro declared that ‘Man, from this Form of his Intestines and that of the Teeth, seems to have been originally designed for feeding on Vegetables.’ Monro explained that carnivores had shorter intestines because just as meat rotted quicker than vegetables, so it was easier to digest (not harder as his forebears like Hecquet had argued). The carnivores’ short gut was designed to evacuate digested meat swiftly before it became dangerously fetid. This could mean that man’s long herbivorous gut – which was made especially large in order to delay the unbecoming ‘ignoble Exercises’ of defecation – was not able to get rid of putrid meat faeces fast enough, thus exposing people to ‘the worst Consequences’.18 When his son, Alexander Monro II, Professor of Medicine, Anatomy and Surgery at Edinburgh, came to reissue his father’s treatise nearly forty years later ‘with Considerable Improvements and Additions, By other Hands’, he and his co-editors kept his father’s herbivorous design perfectly intact.19 Among the hundreds of eminent scientists who emerged from the Monro dynasty – which occupied the Chair of Anatomy continuously for 126 years – was Charles Darwin, who studied medicine at Edinburgh in 1825–7 while Alexander Monro III was continuing his father and grandfather’s lecture course. Darwin showed that even after the radical break from Creationism, the herbivorous argument could be sustained by replacing God’s design with evolutionary origins: ‘We now know that man inhabited warm areas, allowing the favourable conditions for a fruit regimen, which according to the Anatomic laws, is his natural diet.’20

  The Monros’ teachings in the Anatomy department were consistently backed up in other lecture courses at the university. In the thirty-four-year period that William Cullen (1710–90) dominated the Edinburgh medical faculty – holding the Chairs of Chemistry (1755–66), Theory of Medicine (1766–73), Practice of Medicine (1773–89), and simultaneously giving clinical classes in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary (1755–76) – vegetarianism became nothing less than a medical orthodoxy. Cullen lectured to thousands of pupils over the years; he was regarded as one of the greatest authorities in the United Kingdom and was a substantial contributor to European medicine. He was an intellectual celebrity, and he spread his moralised dietary advice to a wide audience. Thanks to the survival of his manuscripts at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh it has been possible to gain a unique insight into the relation between Cullen’s theory and practice. Both his lecture notes and his hitherto unexamined twenty-one volumes of consultation correspondence testify to his moral and medical dedication to vegetarianism.

  Cullen, like most other people, agreed with Monro that ‘There is not so much nourishment in a certain quantity of turnip as in a like Quantity of Beef or mutton.’ But many people already ate too much, he argued, so eating meat risked causing a ‘plethora’ in the body and ultimately obesity and a plague of other ailments. Because meat rotted faster, as Monro had explained, it could not be excreted in time and ‘from these stagnations taking place a corruption will insue which will produce ye most fatal Diseases’. Cullen was particularly concerned that meat ‘over-stimulated’ or irritated the nerves, causing fevers and hypertension;21 and a sample of his medical consultation notes indicates that he prescribed a vegetable diet to at least one-fifth of all patients who came his way. Recommendations such as ‘Nothing seems more useful in such Cases than avoiding irritation by a diet entirely of milk & Vegetables’ are scattered throughout his letters, and he often insisted on the strictest Cheynian ‘milk and seed’ diet.22 A further one-seventh of patients are cautioned to reduce their meat intake to a minimum, while others are allowed some meat with a few limitations. It is also worthy of notice, that Cullen laid nearly as many restrictions on vegetables, many of which he considered too flatulent or cooling, such as roots and cucumber.23

  Cullen’s medical theory led him to the conclusion that meat was pathologically rich and nutritionally superfluous. This was backed up by the anthropological data that had always proved so useful to vegetarians: that the majority of the world’s population survived perfectly happily without ever eating meat. Indeed, Cullen went a step further than most by claiming in his lectures that he could statistically prove that vegetarianism improved health by comparing the meat-eating Muslims in India with their Hindu neighbours: ‘Amounting to above 40,000,000 of People, who live without Animal Food, & seem to enjoy as perfect health as ye Europeans, & more health than ye Mahumetans their Neighbours, who indulge in animal food’. This controlled population survey showed that it could not be the climate, for example, that gave Hindus their long healthy lives.

  Cullen disliked making rash statements, and one can detect his hesitancy about his explosive conclusions: ‘This would tend to say that Animal Food is not necessary, but I dare not say so … But I would observe that where hard labour is not required in all persons of a sedentary & indolent life it is not Necessary.’ In cases of extremely hard labour and cold climates where housing and heating were not sufficient, he allowed that meat might be beneficial. But then he countered that all over the world ‘the lower Class of People … live almost entirely upon Vegetable food, & undergo a great deal of labour, without any inconveniency, & from this Circumstance they are probably free from many Diseases that those who indulge in Animal Food are liable to.’ Breaking through his fear of censure, Cullen eventually came out with it: ‘In short I cannot perceive that animal food is any where necessary to health …& Milk joined with the Farinacia* are probably sufficient for every Duty that Human Life requires.’24 His final conclusion was unambiguous: meat was a dangerous, poisonous superfluity and everyone would be better off without it.

  The irritation that meat-eating caused to the nerves disordered the body; but Cullen also warned that tampering with the nerves also corrupted human morals by disrupting self-control. Loss of self-control in turn led to still more gastronomic indulgence: in a vicious cycle of vice and disease, Cullen showed that intemperate meat-eating was both the cause and effect of diseased morality.25

  Cullen’s theory on the nutritional viability of vegetarianism had ramifications well beyond the realm of medicine. As the historian Rosalie Stott has pointed out, Cullen’s neurological explanation of morality had an important influence on the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment including David Hume. Their friend Adam Smith, the philosopher of the free market, agreed that Stoical self-command (of which temperance and frugality were a part) lay at the heart of human morals and he thought that it was a key principle in the market economy.26 In his seminal work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith noted that Irish prostitutes sustained their incomparable beauty on a diet of potatoes, while Scottish and French labourers hardly ever ate meat, and he thus concluded like Cullen that a diet of grain, vegetables and dairy products ‘can, without any butchers’ meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet’. Thus he rationalised the taxation of meat as a luxury by proposing that ‘It may indeed be doubted whether butchers’ meat is anywhere a necessary of life.’27

  With such prominent members of Edinburgh University promoting a flesh-free ex
istence, the number of vegetarians began to proliferate. Joseph Black (1728–99), the physician and chemist who discovered ‘latent heat’, was one of Cullen’s keenest students and became his assistant before eventually succeeding him in the Chair of Anatomy and Chemistry in Glasgow and then as Professor of Medicine and Chemistry in Edinburgh. In accordance with Cullen’s principles, Black regarded meat as highly stimulating, and when he started suffering from blood-spitting and rheumatic problems himself, he relinquished flesh. Later in life he moved to a house next to the Edinburgh Meadows in order to live almost exclusively on the milk produced on his doorstep. He felt that his diet of ‘fresh air and grass milk’ was insipid but, as he wrote to a friend, it ‘is necessary for me on account of my lungs and it is fortunate that my stomach can bear it. I do feel however sometimes the want of something more stimulating.’ Nevertheless, he thought that his health improved and the rheumatic symptoms disappeared.

  Black treated Hume in his last illness and he became close friends with Adam Smith and other major figures in the Scottish philosophical circle, including James Hutton, the anti-Creationist founder of modern geology, who also ‘ate sparingly’ and is said to have given up meat. When the famous proponent of ‘common sense’ philosophy Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) came to Edinburgh to win the Chair of Philosophy, he became friends with Cullen, moved in with Black and eventually married his niece. Ferguson had been a hearty eater until a ‘paralytic attack’ nearly killed him at the age of fifty. Black put him on a vegetable diet and claimed that this cured his hemiplegia. Ferguson was allowed animal stock in broths but he never ate meat itself: ‘Wine and animal food besought his appetite in vain;’ wrote his friend Lord Cockburn, ‘but huge messes of milk and vegetables disappeared before him.’

  Strengthened by their shared experiences, Black and Ferguson each wrote eulogistic accounts of the other’s vegetarian diets, and they became a renowned pair of vegetable eaters; Ferguson’s son Adam described how ‘it was delightful to see the two philosophers rioting over a boiled turnip.’ Ferguson witnessed Black’s death and wrote admiringly that at the final moment he was sitting calmly ‘at table, with his usual fare, some bread, a few prunes, and a measured quantity of milk diluted with water’. Ferguson himself lived on his rigorous abstinence to the age of ninety-three and ‘never once tasted animal food, or any fermented liquor’ until a few years before his death. Between them they became specimens of considerable curiosity and their medical case-studies were printed in the major journals of the day.28

  Cullen’s theories had a less successful reception in the tragic saga of William Stark, who graduated under Smith and Black in Glasgow and became a dedicatee of the vegetable diet when he joined Monro and Cullen in Edinburgh.29 With the encouragement and guidance of Dr Benjamin Franklin (a renowned scientist as well as a revolutionary American statesman), in June 1769 Stark began to experiment on himself to discover the minimum nourishment a human body required. He limited himself to a measured daily intake of bread and water, apparently emulating the recommendations of Thomas Tryon whose books had inspired Franklin himself to take up vegetarianism. Stark systematically tested the effects of adding portions of flesh to his diet, but he quickly developed the swollen gums of scurvy, and by February of the following year the ardent thirty-year-old had inflicted on himself such severe malnutrition that he perished – a conspicuous death that damaged the vegetarian cause. Here was proof that living on a few ounces of flour was not just deranged but positively lethal, and Franklin wrote to his friends desperately trying to clear up the mess. James Carmichael Smyth, physician extraordinary to the King, published a defensive introduction to the Works of the late William Stark insisting that his diet cannot have been solely responsible for his death. To back up this claim, he printed Stark’s notes on the vegetarians Mr Slingsby and Dr Knight, and Franklin’s own assurance that when he lived on bread and water he found himself as ‘stout and hearty’ as ever.30

  Franklin showed that it was impossible to dissect the medical, economic and ethical motives of vegetarianism. Originally taking up a frugal diet of bread after discovering Tryon’s Way to Health when working as a printer at the age of sixteen, Franklin soon turned his sparing economics into a full-blown endorsement of sparing animals, and this merged easily with his sympathy-based arguments on anti-slavery and political rights. It was the weakness of the humanitarian argument, however, that eventually led him to indulge his appetite after some cod were caught on a ship he was travelling in: ‘on this Occasion, I consider’d with my Master Tryon, the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok’d Murder … I balanc’d some time between Principle & Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.’31 Although Franklin’s commitment to vegetarianism was sporadic, the account of his frugality in his autobiography, and the living example he presented, became the inspiration for many vegetarians in the late eighteenth century.

  Dr James Gregory (1753–1821), another of Cullen’s junior colleagues, carried the tradition of medical vegetarianism into the nineteenth century. Thanks to the survival of the letters of his regular patient, John Ramsay of Ochtertyre (1736–1814), it is possible to chart the trickle-down effect from Cullen’s vegetarian medical school to wider society as patients were routinely instructed to forgo the dangerous luxury of meat. Ramsay’s letters reveal how prominent medical vegetarianism became in the higher circles of the Scottish gentry. From 1797, when Gregory first diagnosed him with a potentially terminal illness, Ramsay regularly resorted to a diet of home-grown vegetables32 to treat heavy colds, stomach complaints, a chronic eye condition and the incipient apoplexy that threatened his life.33 After ten years in this state, he told his cousin Elizabeth Graham that Gregory’s diet had saved him: ‘vegetables and fruit, strange remedies you will say, for such complaints! It is one of the secrets which good Dr Gregory disclosed to me.’34 Following the inclinations of his appetite – and encouraged by the moderate counter-vegetarian advice in Sir John Sinclair’s Essay on Longevity (1802) and Code of Health and Longevity (1807) – Ramsay did allow himself to break Gregory’s strictures from time to time.35 He was no dedicated vegetarian and – as a bull-baiting enthusiast – clearly did not care about the fate of animals. But even in this strictly medical context the vegetable diet carried moral connotations. Ramsay’s abstinence gave him a sense of superiority and he used it as a lever with which to criticise the luxury he saw around him. He refused invitations to dinner with friends whom he considered too lavish, except when he saw it as an opportunity to exhibit ‘my temperance at Dives’s table’*.36 Mixing the role of priest and physician, he imagined prescribing his self-indulgent contemporaries a diet of ‘water, kaill, and sowins†… by way of penance’.37 Damning the party-goers of Stirling, Glasgow and Edinburgh, he commented satirically that ‘A little fasting and prayer or, in other words, a little of Dr Gregory’s regimen, would be good for the purses, persons and souls of those bourgeois-gentlehommes.’38

  Ramsay’s private correspondence reveals a network of humble pursuers of the vegetable regimen in his locality. Ramsay himself was censorious of the too-strict diet of his close friend and fellow sufferer James Stirling of Keir, warning that ‘he is highly culpable in eating nothing but milk and vegetables whereas a mixture of them with animal food would assimilate best.’39 As well as Keir, there was John Francis, restored Earl of Mar (1741–1825) who was, recorded Ramsay, ‘also a patient of Gregory and may be exhibited in the Doctor’s lectures as a strong proof of the effects of temperance and regimen’.40 Another friend, one Mr Edmonstoune, Ramsay predicted would go on a ‘perpetual regimen and abstinence for fat things and strong liquors’.41 And then of course there was Dr Gregory himself who fought a lifelong battle with his own ill health.42

  Ramsay regularly conferred with his fellow vegetable-eaters, just as Cheyne’s converts had communicated as part of a vegetarian clique. There were, n
o doubt, comparable client networks among the patients of dietary doctors all over Europe. If one considers how many of the foremost medical academics of the age advocated the vegetable diet, and then extrapolate to the impact they had on their students, the hundreds of practising doctors who followed their lead, and the very wide general readership of their books; then extend again to all the patients who were prescribed this vegetable course, the number of people in eighteenth-century Europe who followed a vegetable diet starts to look incalculably large. Categorising temporary abstinence from flesh as vegetarianism would be going too far, but it engaged the public with the experience and some of the theories concerning the salubrity of meat and the nourishing qualities of vegetables, and in many cases it brought them towards the moral position occupied by the vegetarians. Far from being confined to the ‘irrational fringe’, vegetarianism had come to occupy the moral and intellectual high ground of European culture.

  Ramsay’s perspective on the ethics of vegetarianism may have been further developed by his much beloved cousin Maria Graham (née Dundas, later Lady Calcott) who spent years travelling across India in search of the vegetarian idyll she had been led to expect by the travel literature.43 Ramsay was deeply worried that she would become so absorbed in Indian religion that she would ‘forget her Catechism’ and lose her Christian roots altogether.44 Ramsay already knew at least one man who had done this and become a raving vegetarian Indophile. In fact, Graham was quickly disillusioned, as she registered in her Journal of a Residence in India (1812) and Letters on India (1814): ‘very few Hindoos abstain entirely from animal food,’45 she lamented, ‘My expectations of Hindoo innocence and virtue are fast giving way, and I fear that, even among the Pariahs, I shall not find anything like St Pierre’s Chaumiere Indienne.’46 Graham’s sceptical response to Indian vegetarianism was no doubt representative of most people in society. But there were others who still regarded the Indians as the prime exemplars of the truth of the vegetarian theories propounded in the university medical faculties. One of these was Ramsay’s old acquaintance, John Williamson of Moffat.