PHILLIPS, Somerset Co., Me., April 28, 1835.
DEAR SIR,--I have a brother-in-law, who owes his life to abstinence from animal food, and strict adherence to the simplest vegetable diet. My own existence is prolonged, only (according to human probabilities) by entire abstinence from flesh-meat of every description, and feeding principally upon the coarsest farinacea.
Numberless other instances have come under my observation within the last three years, in which a strict adherence to a simple vegetable diet has done for the wretched invalid what the best medical treatment had utterly failed to do; and in no one instance have I known permanently injurious results to follow from this course, but in many instances have had to lament the want of firmness and decision, and a gradual return to the "_flesh-pots of Egypt_."
With these views, I very cheerfully comply with your general invitation, on page 77, volume 12, of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. The answers to your interrogatories will apply to the case first referred to, to my own case, and to nearly every one which has occurred within my notice.
1. Increased, uniformly; and in nearly every instance, without even the usual debility consequent upon withdrawing the stimulus of animal food.
4. None aggravated, except flatulence in one or two instances. All the horrid train of dyspeptic symptoms uniformly mitigated, and obstinate constipation removed.
6. Three years, with my brother; with myself, eighteen months partially, and three months wholly; the others, from one to six months.
8. Cold water--my brother and myself; others, hot and cold water alternately.
10. I believe the health of _students_ would uniformly be promoted--and the days of the laborer, to say the least, would be lengthened.
11. I have; and that is, simple bread made of wheat meal, ground in corn-stones, and mixed up precisely as it comes from the mill--with the substitution of fine flour when the bowels become too active.
SIR,--My age is fifty-three. My ancestors had all melted away with hereditary consumption. At the age of twenty, I began to be afflicted with pain in different parts of the thorax, and other premonitory symptoms of phthisis pulmonalis. Soon after this, my mother and eldest sister died with the disease. For myself, having a severe attack of ague and fever, all my consumptive symptoms became greatly aggravated; the pain was shifting--sometimes between the shoulders, sometimes in the side, or breast, etc. System extremely irritable, pulse hard and easily excited, from about ninety to one hundred and fifty, by the stimulus of a very small quantity of food; and, to be short, I was given up, on all hands, as lost.