While Scottish patients consulted doctors in Edinburgh’s austere medical faculty, for their treatment they were sent to Moffat, the fashionable lowland spa town where mineral springs soothed their ailing bodies. Awaiting their arrival – ready to prey upon their hypochondriac fears – was John Williamson, Moffat’s resident vegetarian. Williamson had no medical training, and he never achieved the intellectual stature or national fame of George Cheyne, but, like the fat doctor in Bath, he did manage to convert some high-standing members of Europe’s literary world to his animal-friendly creed.
Williamson started life as a shepherd and allegedly lost the tenancy when he refused to sell his sheep for slaughter. His landlord John Hope, 2nd Earl of Hopetoun – who himself published treatises on the wisdom of animals and the carnivorous extreme of the ‘Englishman’s food’47 – took a liking to Williamson’s eccentric manners and bestowed upon him a small annual pension. Known to his friends as ‘Pythagoras’, Williamson wandered the hills prospecting for minerals, attracting the attention of landowners and mining magnates who encouraged him to trace (from medieval manuscripts) seams of silver and cinnabar on their lands. On one of his rambles he discovered the medicinal spring at Hartfell near Moffat: the Earl of Hopetoun built a road to the spring for invalids and awarded Williamson the profits from the highly esteemed bottled water.
Williamson shocked his neighbours by absconding from church and worshipping God (like the ‘oriental theologists’) among the mountains and grand scenery of nature. He became something of a local character and his unconventional views on sex provided endless amusement to the lairds. It was rumoured that despite being a bachelor Williamson thought that every fit man should keep at least three wives. When asked why he resisted his own amorous recommendations he is reported to have answered that ‘the women of this age and country are such abominable flesh-eaters that I cannot think of any serious connection with them.’ His friends introduced him to a girl who, they claimed, abstained from animal food; Williamson was initially charmed, but his heart was soon broken when ‘Jenny’ having ‘a strong hankering after flesh’ ran off with the soldiers.
When John Ramsay visited Moffat to treat his stomach complaints in 1757, decades before becoming a vegetarian patient of James Gregory, Williamson latched onto him and took the opportunity, in the course of a country walk, to divulge to him ‘with great enthusiasm the doctrines of the Pythagoreans and Brahmins’. Despite his opinion that ‘John had a mist in his brain’, Ramsay became so fascinated with Williamson that he ended up writing a short biography of him. After encountering him on a number of occasions, Ramsay recalled that the Indian travel books had made Williamson embrace ‘with all the ardour of a new convert the opinions of Pythagoras and the Brahmins with regard to the transmigration of souls and the duty of abstaining from animal food, as conducing to the health of the body and the soul’.48 Williamson’s enthusiasm for the Indian vegetarians earned him the nickname ‘Brachman’, and, emulating their peaceful example, he preached a message of non-violence and kindness to animals to the bemusement of his Scottish audience.
But Williamson did not expect his listeners to take his convictions on trust. The fact that eating meat made people sick, he argued, was proof that killing animals was contrary to the laws of God and nature. Ramsay was aware of the medical aspect of Williamson’s arguments, and he acknowledged that ‘His Brahminical diet had not impaired his health or strength.’ Even the moral aspects of Williamson’s diet struck a chord with Ramsay’s own tendencies. Ramsay gleefully described dinner parties in which Williamson played the anti-luxury critic – just as Ramsay himself did when he later took up the vegetable diet. At the home of Baron Erskine, Williamson once watched the local aristocrat Harry St Clair munching his way through a huge heap of meat, and ‘with equal scorn and indignation … declaimed against flesh-eaters’. St Clair later fell ill and was forced – just like Ramsay – to live on nothing but ‘prayers and porridge’.49
New light has been shed on this dimension of Williamson’s vegetarianism thanks to David Allen’s recent discovery of Williamson’s manuscript, ‘A Just Complaint on Mankind for Injuring, Killing and Eating Animals’ (c.1765).50 This extraordinary treatise suggests that Williamson did not believe in reincarnation as Ramsay claimed; rather, his views were broadly compatible with the medical case for vegetarianism propounded by the professors of Edinburgh University. Indeed, he presented the moral case for vegetarianism as an extrapolation from their scientific theories.
Williamson argued that man’s herbivorous anatomy was not designed for ‘bloody’ carnage,51 so meat-eating spoiled people’s ‘blood & Juices, with Acid humours Causing Rheumatisms, Scurvys, pains, fevers &c. and with Gluey humours, causing obstructions Asthmas Coughs decays &c.’. In line with Cullen, he warned that these physiological disorders had a knock-on effect on the mind, stimulating ‘Anger, & Melancholy, Madness &c. distempering the mind’.52 Just like Ramsay, Williamson said of himself that since becoming a vegetarian, ‘he enjoys a better state of health, than in flesh eating Wherein he had fevers scurvys violent head achs Tooth achs &c … He also now finds his passions more easily moderated & ruled by reason than in his former way of living.’53
Williamson took these medical observations to their theological conclusion. If God made meat poisonous to the human body, it followed that He did not want humans to kill and eat animals. The sickness caused by meat-eating was nature’s way of punishing humans for murdering creatures.54 This was a logical extrapolation from the medical case for vegetarianism, not an entirely alien viewpoint.
Williamson’s almost deist system of divine justice being wreaked by the forces of nature had one principal source: the works of Thomas Tryon. Exactly like Tryon, Williamson taught that the furious spirits of a violently slaughtered animal remained in its flesh and incited the consumer to wrathful acts of murder, and thence caused ‘famine & pestilence the Common Consequences of War’.55 Williamson excised Tryon’s outdated ideas about the occult power of sympathy and replaced them with a credible process of mechanical cause and effect. This providential mechanism, he thought, was manifested in events such as the late seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch war, which started over a fight about fishing rights, and in the recent war with the French (1754–63) in America which, he said, ‘arose about fishing and the fur Trade of Deer & Beaver Skins’.56 Justice had been done when humans killed each other in their avaricious competition for the profits derived from animal murders.
Williamson recommended Tryon’s Way to Health – which he appears to have asked the book-collecting Earl of Hopetoun to purchase on his behalf 57 – and he even claimed that there were other communities of ‘Tyronians’ (sic) still living in England and Pennsylvania. In addition to a comprehensive list of early flesh-shunning ascetics – from the seventh-century Glaswegian bishop St Mungo to the twelfth-century Waldensians – Williamson produced an impressive catalogue of modern vegetarians. He tracked down the 1745 edition of Roger Crab’s English Hermit, Robert Cook’s defence of Pythagorean vegetarianism, an account of the Pennsylvanian Dunkards in the Royal Magazine (1759), and George Cheyne’s The English Malady and Essay on Regimen.58 Williamson successfully forged a unity out of the ideas gleaned from all these authors, from Cook’s vegan proscription on wearing animal products to Crab’s vegetarian Bible exegesis (which he embellished with the observation that Jesus ordered His disciples to stop being fishermen).59
Above all, Williamson was enamoured of the Indian Brahmins and Banians, and he read about them in every ancient and modern source he could lay his hands on: Strabo, Arrian, Porphyry, Clement of Alexandria, Palladius, the travel collections of John Churchill and John Harris, as well as Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay’s syncretic histories of world religion.60 Follow the Indians’ example, said Williamson, and humans could restore their original happiness as far ‘as possible in the present State’.61 Rather like the enlightened self-interest arguments of modern ecological and permacultural philosophies, Williamson insist
ed that wild animals could be more useful alive than dead. Even those traditionally considered pests, like moles, were actually beneficial, for they cultivated the soil.62 The art of camouflage and even the technology of flight could be learned from the animals, and tamed rats would eat less food than the cats and dogs employed to catch them. The animals – according to Williamson’s interpretation of the Fall – only became wild and savage because of man’s violence and murder. If only humans would ‘reclaim & reconcile them’ by reverting to vegetarian pacifism, they would grow tame and helpful.63 Williamson even thought we should emulate the beasts’ natural mating patterns (seasonal copulation limited by sustainable birth control), a habit he said the ancient Brahmins employed, which was also the kind of naturalist model for human behaviour advocated by Rousseau and by Tryon’s ‘Complaint of the Cow and the Oxen’.64
He mediated this idealism through a serious engagement with current socio-political developments, such as the clearance of Scottish communities from the land for the sake of animal grazing. Williamson appears to have been one of the first (if not the first) to work out a thorough critique of meat-eating on the basis of its resource inefficiency. It was an idea that, within a few decades, all the greatest economic and philosophical authors – including Adam Smith, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Thomas Malthus – would heed. Vegetable subsistence, he claimed, is
the most innocent and profitable Moral & Political method for society, as it wou’d not only remove the great Grass farms feeding Cattle to the Slaughter, which now in many places depopulate the Country: But by multiplying the people & improving the ground to the best advantage to bear fruits and grains greens &c. this method would make the most wholesom necessarys of life so plentifull & easy to be got, that they would relieve all the Indigents distresses;65
This is not very different from the view of modern demographers who warn that it will only be possible to feed the world’s growing population if we limit the resource-inefficient business of animal-grazing and use the land to produce arable crops for human consumption instead.66 In the bleak era of the Highland Clearances, when crofters’ survival was pushed to the brink by powerful landowners seeking profits from grazing, Williamson caught a glimpse of the threat to world food-security posed by competition for limited resources. Even though this did not readily fit into his providential scheme – because these victims of meat-eating were not the consumers – Williamson appealed to egalitarian justice against the interests of a few.
In 1787, about twenty years after Williamson’s death, the Gentleman’s Magazine ran a eulogy on him which claimed that his vegetable diet had preserved his health to the age of over ninety (twenty years older than Ramsay’s more objective account suggests). This report also mentioned the epitaph and obelisk erected by his friend Sir George Clerk of Penicuik above his burial spot in Moffat churchyard ‘at a distance from the other burying places’.67 This obituary was reproduced by the Scottish antiquarian Joseph Ritson in his vegetarian anthology in 1802; it seems possible that Ritson knew Williamson or Ramsay and he may even have read Williamson’s manuscript.68 By giving voice to a range of vegetarian arguments and compiling numerous abstruse references to others, Williamson contributed to the formation of the ‘vegetarian’ tradition.
Despite his humble beginnings, Williamson’s principles reached the highest rungs of society. As a young man James Boswell (1740–95) was sent to Moffat from his home in Edinburgh to treat a scorbutic nervous illness with the salubrious mineral waters. He strolled over the hills with Williamson and embraced his call for a return to nature – no doubt as impressed by the idea of emulating the animals’ mating habits as he was by his vegetarianism. Boswell always retained a primitivist streak – idealising Williamson and Rousseau in turn and yearning to flee to the woods himself – for which he was frequently reprimanded by his more conventional father-figure, Samuel Johnson.69 If you wish to regress to the desert, said Johnson drily, return to Scotland for they have plenty of desert there. Johnson’s suggestion that Scotland was a breeding ground of primitivism was a sardonic quip; nevertheless, it seems that abstemiousness, and in particular vegetarianism, since at least the days of George Cheyne, struck a special resonance north of the border, if only as an attempt to distance Scottish identity from the luxurious roast beef of England.
Later in life Boswell wrote to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the hope of obtaining a blessing from this revered guru of nature. In a confessional account of his own life Boswell told Rousseau about meeting Williamson in his youth: ‘I met an old Pythagorean,’ wrote Boswell, ‘I attached myself to him. I made an obstinate resolve never to eat any flesh, and I was resolved to suffer everything as a martyr to humanity.’ He told Rousseau that although he had never completely renounced these moral principles, they had dropped out of his life, and he conformed to convention.70 But the sensitivities remained latent, surfacing in his guilty conscience on killing birds for sport,71 and feeling pity for fighting cocks.72
Ironically, Boswell was continually forced to return to a flesh-free diet in his lifelong struggle with recurring bouts of gonorrhoea (contracted during his enthusiastic adoption of the polygamous sexual practices of deer).73 In using diet for health, Boswell was encouraged by George Cheyne’s prescriptions, which he and Johnson mutually enthused about in The Life of Samuel Johnson. Both Boswell and Johnson diagnosed themselves with Cheyne’s ‘English Malady’, and felt that Cheyne was their physiological advocate and guide. Indeed, Johnson was so impressed by Cheyne’s theories that – tortured by hypochondria, eye disorders and frequent colds – he suppressed his notorious appetite and adopted what he called ‘a semivegetable diet’, which Cheyne had recommended for mild nervous disorders. Writing often to Mrs Thrale about the details of his diet, he assured her that while he indulged occasionally, for the most part he exercised rigorous abstinence, living often on nothing but potatoes, spinach or peas.74
Johnson insisted that his diet was based on the most rigorous medical considerations, but he also questioned man’s moral right to kill, and vehemently objected to the cruelty of vivisection.75 Launching a full-frontal assault on the standard defence of eating meat employed by William King, Buffon and Soame Jenyns among others,76 Johnson argued that the important question was not whether farm animals owed their lives to the people who bred them but ‘whether animals who endure such sufferings of various kinds, for the service and entertainment of man, would accept of existence upon the terms on which they have it’.77
When Boswell finally managed to drag Johnson away from the comforts of London on their famous journey to the Hebrides in 1773, he sneaked onto their itinerary a quick visit to his old friend the notorious Scottish judge, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714–99). Monboddo had recently published his opinion that the great apes – gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans – were races of primitive people who had not yet learned to speak. Although not so far from modern evolutionary theories, this seemed ridiculous to his contemporaries and Johnson frequently had a laugh at Monboddo’s expense – but he readily agreed to lunch with the eccentric laird on their way to Aberdeen.
Monboddo was a striking figure in the history of primitivism, a stepping stone between Rousseau’s idealisation of the noble savage and the Romantics’ attempt to realign culture with the wild ‘state of nature’. For Monboddo, no less than for Rousseau, the evolutionary origin of the human species – particularly its natural diet – was of paramount importance in determining man’s innate characteristics. Monboddo inherited the paradox of Rousseau’s Origins of Inequality in acknowledging that man had the ‘amphibious’ capacity to be either a solitary carnivore or a herding herbivore. But, like Rousseau, he insisted that ‘by nature, and in his original state, he is a frugivorous animal, and that he only becomes an animal of prey by acquired habit’. Human populations turned to hunting and agriculture when they grew too numerous to be fed by the fruits of nature, and the transition from herbivore to carnivore, Monboddo thought, produced ‘a great change of character
’:
While man continued to feed upon the fruits of the earth, he was an innocuous animal … But as soon as he became a hunter, the wild beast, which is part of his composition, became predominant in him. He grew fierce and bold, delighting in blood and slaughter. War soon succeeded to hunting; and the necessary consequence of war was the victors eating the vanquished, when they could kill or catch them. In this state, man, if not tamed, or subdued by laws or manners, is the most dangerous and most mischevous of all the creatures that God has made;
Monboddo thus carved out a position between Rousseau and Hobbes. He contradicted Rousseau by insisting that the ‘ties of love and sympathy which bind us so fast together’ were acquired, not instinctive; but neither was man the exclusively selfish animal Hobbes imagined. Monboddo answered Buffon’s objections to the antisocial aspects of Rousseau’s so-called ‘primitivism’ by insisting that social affections and the human intellect did have to be cultivated, but the body should be kept as close to the state of nature as possible.78 Monboddo thus resolved the timeworn clash between nature and culture, by arguing that it was possible to follow both simultaneously. Europeans, he argued, should emulate the Indians, who had cultivated their intellects for longer than any nation, but whose vegetarian regimen ‘is as natural as any diet can be’. Although they took their respect for animal life ‘too far’ by feeding lice with their own blood, Monboddo complained that ‘we in Europe go to the other extreme, and abuse very much that dominion which God has given us over the animals.’
The Bloodless Revolution Page 32
