It was in the very depths of his sickness, however, that Cheyne discovered the vital combination of physical and spiritual regeneration that would mark the turning point in his life. Under the guidance of the Anglican priest George Garden, he found solace in the spiritual writings of the primitive Christians and European mystics.10 Pacifying his soul with a course of healthy reading, Cheyne found the strength to placate his body with a primitive abstinent diet.11
In ‘The Case of the Author’, which became his user’s guide to vegetarianism, Cheyne claimed that as soon as he took up a ‘low diet’ he started ‘melting away like a Snow-ball in Summer’. The truly miraculous cure took effect, he wrote, when, in around 1708, God intervened and guided a sequence of events that ended in his conversion to vegetarianism. Cheyne happened to meet a clergyman who ‘accidentally’ dropped a hint about a man in Croydon – one Dr Taylor – who had cured himself of epilepsy by sticking exclusively to a diet of milk. For Cheyne, this was nothing short of an epiphany. Despite his sickness, he rode out from London in the middle of winter to meet Dr Taylor, and, as if by divine ordination, Cheyne arrived panting with anticipation and ‘found him at home, at his full Quart of Cow’s Milk (which was all his Dinner)’.12
As a dedicated disciple of Pitcairne’s mathematical-hydraulic physiology, Cheyne was certain that epilepsy was caused by the same hydraulic blockages in the blood and nerves as all other nervous illnesses. So if abstaining from meat and living on milk cured the one, he deduced, it ought to cure all the others. Furthermore, since milk was just semi-digested vegetables, the milk and vegetable diet should theoretically be the universal remedy.13
Cheyne immediately relinquished flesh and restricted himself to a diet of milk with ‘Seeds, Bread, mealy Roots, and Fruit’. The effect was instantaneous. He lost sixteeen or eighteen stone, and in a matter of months was cured of his crippling nervous distempers. With miraculous speed, said Cheyne, ‘I had been extremely reduced in my Flesh, and was become Lank, Fleet and Nimble.’14 The efficacy of Cheyne’s milk, seed and vegetable diet was proved not just on paper, but on his own body in full view of British society. With such a substantial, corporeal demonstration before them – the archetype of before-and-after weight-loss advertising – Cheyne’s miracle diet was guaranteed a starry future.15
His conversion to vegetarianism became a legendary event. After his death in 1743, and for the rest of the century, scores of biographical dictionaries reported that the vegetable diet had cut two-thirds off Cheyne’s bulk, brought him back from the brink of death, and allowed him to live to the ripe old age of seventy-two. Even commentators who pointed out that Cheyne was still immense by ordinary standards acknowledged that he had been effectively cured of his malaise.16 A playful obituary-epitaph ‘On the death of Dr Cheyne’ commemorated his dietary success:
Once hypochondriac, of portentous Size:
Since, lively, slender, by his Milk’s Supplies …
For, while on Earth, from Carnage and from Wine
Abstaining, he on harmless Milk would dine.17
The benefit of the vegetable diet was mechanically demonstrable, but Cheyne believed that it was God who had revealed it to him. In the climactic sentence of ‘The Case of the Author’, he suggested that God, through ‘casual Hints’ (like the one about Dr Taylor) had deliberately transformed him into the world’s vegetarian guru.18 With his divine mandate, Cheyne fused the role of spiritual priest and physical doctor to promote his complete dietary regimen. The vegetable diet was no longer just a set of food regulations, it was, as he put it in the final words of The English Malady, ‘an Eminence of Light and Tranquility’. Skirting the divide between Enlightenment rhetoric, illuminist revelation and the benefits of the ‘light’ diet, Cheyne presented his dietary cure as the quintessential medical, spiritual and moral Enlightenment.19
Like today’s lifestyle gurus, Cheyne claimed to resolve the turmoil of mind and body in one holistic method and his promises were greeted by followers with reverential enthusiasm. His works were widely read by both medical and lay audiences, selling more copies than any medical book of the period; the Essay of Health and Long Life (1724) went through at least twenty-four editions and The English Malady (1733) was reprinted six times within two years.20 His fame quickly spread to Italy, France, Holland, Germany, Ireland and America and sufferers of nervous disorders wrote to him from all over the kingdom. His books warned people they needed personal guidance, so Cheyne was inundated by patients demanding one-to-one consultations in which they confessed to their dietary peccadilloes and received remedial absolution. With a successful practice in London, Cheyne also set up shop in the fashionable spa town of Bath (where crowds flocked every year to drink mineral water and bathe in the therapeutic springs – and to dance at society balls). There he helped found what is now the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, and became the celebrity doctor to a spectacular array of political and literary icons. Using his own ‘crazy Carcase’ as a vivid example to others, Cheyne achieved the cultic status of society’s greatest diet doctor.21
Samuel Johnson’s companion Mrs Thrale characterised the height of devotion his followers attained: ‘when I read Cheyne,’ she declared, ‘I feel disposed to retire to Arruchar in the Highlands of Scotland – live on oat bread and Milk, and bathe in the Frithe of Clyde for seven years.’22 John Wesley, founder of the thriving Methodist movement, adored Cheyne’s tocsin for temperance, built it into his own preaching on the Primitive Physic, and attributed his longevity to following Cheyne’s vegetarian rules.23 Samuel Richardson reported that ‘more and more’ people were giving up meat and following his dietary method.24 Cheyne was frequently anthologised in the popular medical self-help books, while poetic eulogies about him are scattered through the literature of the period. The rebel laird Hon. Alexander Robertson praised the ‘inspir’d, divinely just’ Dr Cheyne and elsewhere claimed that he too ‘ne’er could see [animals] bleed, / Ev’n to subsist himself, whom they were born to feed’.25
Needless to say, there were as many who found Cheyne’s advice preposterous. One satirist lampooned Cheyne with the title ‘Dr Diet’, commenting that ‘the Trick of making Men Immortal upon Asparagus and Parsnips, will not deserve a Patent.’26 A macho pro-meat poem in the Grub Street Journal refuted Cheyne’s ‘silly books’ by appealing to the evidence of anatomy: ‘Were the brave grinders in my head, / Plac’d only to crack nuts: champ bread?’27 In his biography of the great wit Richard ‘Beau’ Nash, Oliver Goldsmith reported that ‘When Cheney recommended his vegetable diet, Nash would swear, that his design was to send half the world grazing like Nebuchadnezzar.’28
In the medical profession, Cheyne’s work spawned numerous copycat volumes and as many vehement refutations.29 When his dietary extremism was attacked by ‘the Beef eating Doctor’, David Bayne-Kinnier, Cheyne had a hard time convincing Pope’s friend Lady Murray that her sister, Lady Grisell Baillie (his ‘Disciple’), was under no danger from her vegetable diet. Opposition to Cheyne was so aggressive he once wrote in fear to Lady Selina Huntingdon that ‘I have been threatened with being mobbed.’30 John Arbuthnot, probably the most esteemed doctor of the age, remarked that Cheyne ‘became the subject of Conversation, and produc’d even Sects in the dietetick Philosophy’. Arbuthnot orchestrated a systematic counter-vegetarian movement to challenge the claims of Cheyne and his medical followers. ‘Man’, he insisted, ‘is by his Frame as well as his Appetite a carnivorous Animal.’ But despite his opposition, Arbuthnot admitted that ‘I know of more than one Instance of irascible Passions being much subdu’d by a vegetable Diet’.31 Other colleagues who repudiated the dietary extremism of the ‘fat-headed Scot’ – like Thomas Morgan, John Wynter and Richard Mead – conceded that people should eat more vegetables and less meat, and should avoid meat altogether when suffering from certain ailments.32
At a safe distance from the corrupt Babylon that he perceived London to be (ignoring the fact that Bath itself was a major centre of conspicuous consumption), Cheyne launched o
ne of the most severe attacks on luxury in Georgian Britain. As a Tory – possibly even a Jacobite (a supporter of the Stuart succession) – Cheyne saved a special dart for the tyrannical ‘Roman’ luxury associated with Robert Walpole’s corrupt Whig government.33 Adopting the political language of Crab and Tryon, he offered to lead his patients from the oppressive ‘flesh Pots of Egypt’ and prescribed them food laws to guide them to the ‘Promised Land’ of milk and honey.34 Although Cheyne tended to avoid the customary language of enthused vegetarians, sometimes he could not resist: ‘these Pythagoreans, these Milk and Vegetable Eaters’, he declared at the end of The English Malady, ‘were the longest liv’d, and honestest of Men. Milk and Honey was the Complexion of the Land of Promise, and Vegetables the Diet of the Paradisiacal State.’35
Using such loaded rhetoric, it was little surprise that Cheyne’s contemporaries saw him as a new Roger Crab. He was presented by Thomas Tryon’s old publisher, George Conyers, as even more radical than Tryon himself,36 and he was remembered this way for generations.37 One satirical sketch apparently cast Cheyne as a primitivist bent on emulating the herbivorous feral children recently discovered in the forests of Europe: ‘I am told that the new sect of herb-eaters intend to follow him into the fields, or to beg him for a clerk of their kitchen; and that there are many of them now thinking of turning their children into woods to graze with the cattle, in hopes to raise a healthy and moral race, refined from the corruptions of this luxurious world.’38 Cheyne felt such characterisation was wholly unjust; he was horrified by the rumour that he was ‘at Bottom a mere Leveller, and for destroying Order, Ranks and Property’ and that he had ‘turn’d mere Enthusiast, and … advis’d People to turn Monks, to run into Desarts, and to live on Roots, Herbs and wild Fruits’.39 Instead, he strenuously promoted his image as a moderate scientist advising temperance on the basis of empirical evidence. Onlookers readily lumped vegetable-toting doctors with all the other vegetarians, but Cheyne stressed that medically motivated abstinence from meat had nothing to do with the radical tradition of former decades.
Cheyne’s vegetarianism was indeed backed up by a rigorous physiological theory at the cutting edge of contemporaneous neural science. In the 1660s the Oxford anatomist Thomas Willis had dissected innumerable human and animal corpses and come to the conclusion that the soul – contrary to all previous speculations – resided around the cerebellum in the brain, and it operated by pumping animal spirits into the latticework of hollow nerves. His pupil, John Locke, later demonstrated that the senses were the source of every notion in the human mind.40 By the eighteenth century, every educated person had some idea of the nervous system, and it became the dominant means of explaining everything from feelings to character.
In the course of Cheyne’s career, the theory of neural function gradually changed. In early life Cheyne believed that nerves pulsed fluid around the body with the help of adjacent vibrating fibres.41 But after 1722 Cheyne stopped thinking about nerves as hollow tubes and claimed instead that they were solid springy fibres resonating like the strings of an instrument, and he tentatively added Newton’s idea that an omnipresent ‘etherial substance’ might pervade them, creating ‘the Cement between the human Soul and the Body’.42
Eighteenth-century society was obsessed with nerves. They were the sensitive interchange between mind and body and held a position equivalent to that which genes have acquired today as an explanation of inherited predispositions that could be triggered or mollified by lifestyle. A sensitive nervous system was an essential attribute for any genteel man or woman. Sensitive – or ‘sensible’ – nerves ensured a fine sentiment and a morality underwritten by the divinely ordered anatomy. God had created the human body with organs of sense: what better tool for moral judgement and social conduct? ‘Feeling’ demonstrated both refined manners and fidelity to nature.
But sensitive nerves were also dangerously susceptible to nervous disorders, and Cheyne diagnosed the English as suffering from a nervous epidemic. Society was plagued with the ‘English Malady’ – a psychosomatic disorder Cheyne himself helped to invent with innumerable symptoms from mild trembling to fainting and paralysis.
Cheyne’s most successful medical coup was making everyone believe that being susceptible to nervous distempers was a sign of superior sensitivity.43 He was in a prime position to sympathise with his ‘fellow-sufferers’, for he felt that he too had been born with tender, oversensitive nerves: ‘my Senses and Sensibility were rather too acute’, he declared, causing ‘a Disposition to be easily ruffled on a Surprize’.44 His theories spawned fictional characters like Oliver Goldsmith’s hero in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) who likewise suffered (or claimed to) from ‘a disorder in which the whole body is so exquisitely sensible, that the slightest touch gives pain’.45 By the beginning of the nineteenth century Jane Austen was mocking the perilous excesses of ‘Sense and Sensibility’, but despite these sardonic jabs, sensibility remained a social code with very wide appeal.46
Those born with sensitive nervous systems were vulnerable to severe disorders if they committed even a slight degree of dietary intemperance, especially in meat and alcohol. Cheyne combined the tradition of Cartesian mechanistic physiology with Isaac Newton’s latest theories on the gravitational properties of different substances to develop his rigorous physiological explanation of how meat attacked the nervous system. By the standards of modern science Cheyne’s theories are inaccurate, but the dangers of meat and alcohol which he highlighted have nevertheless remained a preoccupation up to the present day. Cheyne inherited his moral concern about eating too much meat from his predecessors while revising the medical explanation of its harmful effects; we have done the same in turn. Cheyne’s belief that meat and alcohol clogged the body’s hydraulic system, for example, foreshadows the modern idea that consuming too much meat and alcohol blocks blood vessels with cholesterol. Claims by modern dieticians tend to be founded on direct scientific observation – but the questions that motivated those observations and the conceptual framework through which they are made are influenced by inherited cultural traditions. Men like Cheyne can shed light on why we think as we do today.47
Cheyne reported that meat was high in ‘urinous’ salts, which were visible when one distilled meat and examined the residue after burning it.48 He knew that salts accumulated into sharp-pointed crystals, and had read in Newton that these particles ‘unite the most firmly of any Bodies whatsoever’.49 Meat was also high in fatty oils, he said, and these gathered together into deposits which also could not be broken down because they ‘attract one another, and unite more strongly than other Substances do, (except Salts) as Sir Isaac Newton observes’. Furthermore, animal flesh was composed of smaller particles than vegetables (because they had already been filtered by one digestive system) and thus they stuck together more strongly and so were even harder to digest.
If you came to Cheyne with a nervous complaint, the first thing he would do was take a sample of your blood and leave it aside to settle. If you had too much glutinous red globular blood compared to clear fluid serum he would warn you that it was too thick and sticky. Your capillaries were in danger of blocking up, bursting open and forming ulcerated swellings which would squeeze on nearby nerves and thus ‘stop and intercept their Vibrations or Tremors’.50 This interruption of the nervous system caused fainting, melancholy and apoplexy.
Next he would take a drop of blood and taste it on his tongue. The serum, he remarked like a true connoisseur, ought to be ‘almost insipid, or, at least, not biting saltish’: if there was too much salt in your blood, hard crystals could form and wedge themselves in small blood vessels. Then, ‘like a Lancet or Razor’, each sharp crystal would pierce through the vessels, ram up against nerve fibres and thus, ‘by twitching and vellicating the Nerves or nervous Fibres, produce Convulsions, Spasms, and all the terrible Symptoms of that Tribe of nervous Distempers’.51 In addition, he would probably suggest that your bodily fibres had become too lax (through insufficient exer
cise and too much eating). This reduced the body’s ability to break down tough particles, which exacerbated the other problems and could cause trembling, lethargy, numbness and even paralysis.52
Nervous disorders, then, were mainly the symptoms of having ‘bad blood’ as a result of eating too much of the wrong sort of food – a condition Cheyne often referred to by the amorphous term ‘scurvy’. Diagnosing nervous distempers in this way, Cheyne was able to bring under his remit a whole host of ailments, from hypochondria, hysteria, asthma and ‘the Vapours’ to the classic disorders of intemperance – gout, rheumatism and scrofula. The scientific analysis gave him the platform from which to bellow his moral censures on intemperate meat-eating:
The Scurvy is the Root of most chronical Diseases of the British Nation; and is a necessary Consequence of their Way of living almost wholly on animal Food, and drinking so much strong Liquors… Nothing less than a very moderate Use of animal Food … and a more moderate use of spiritous Liquors, due Labour and Exercise… can keep this Hydra under. And nothing else than a total Abstinence from animal Foods, and strong fermented Liquors, can totally extirpate it.53
Meat, considered by most of his contemporaries to be the most desirable and nourishing of all foods, Cheyne perceived as harbouring a richness verging on excess. The poor saved meagre wages to buy the occasional joint of flesh; the rich consumed it in staggering quantities. In Britain especially, beef-eating was becoming synonymous with national pride and the annual consumption of 208 pounds of meat per head consumed by the British navy was seen as crucial to the nation’s military prowess.54 Cheyne’s admonition that people should avoid meat and drink water flew in the face of common opinion.55 But Cheyne stuck to his mechanical arguments and showed that the flesh-free vegetable diet was perfectly suited to prevent and cure nervous distempers. ‘Milk and Vegetables have but little saline Matter,’ he observed; they diluted the blood and refreshed the body’s fibres.56
The Bloodless Revolution Page 22