We have already mentioned Lord Erskine as one of the many eminent friends of Dr. Lambe. That more humane and distinguished lawyer, in a letter to his friend acknowledging the receipt of the _Reports_, writes as follows: “I am of opinion that both this work and the other referred to in it are deserving of the highest consideration. I read them both with more interest and attention from the abuse of the _British Critic_ [one of the periodicals of the day] mentioned in the preface, as no periodical criticism ever published in this country is so uniformly unjust, ignorant, and impudent.” Dr. Abernethy’s testimony to the efficacy of abstinence in cases of cancer will be found in the notice of that eminent practitioner. Amongst the most interesting correspondence of his later years is his interchange of ideas with Sylvester Graham--the first of the American prophets of the reformed regimen. The letter to the celebrated American vegetarian is, as Dr. Lambe’s latest biographer justly observes, “a most valuable relic, because it continues the result of Dr. Lambe’s diet up to September, 1837--twenty-three years after the last notice of his health in the account of his own case, which he published in November, 1814. It is, besides, an admirable proof of his truthful and philosophic mind, which was slow to arrive at conclusions, and willing rather to exaggerate than otherwise the traces of disease which he still felt.” He proves, also, in this letter, how slow and yet sure are the effects of diet, and it supplies an answer to those objectors who complain that they have tried the diet (perhaps for a few weeks only) without any good result. After complimenting his transatlantic fellow-worker in the cause of truth upon his zeal and industry, Dr. Lambe proceeds:--
“My book, entitled _Additional Reports on Regimen_, has now been before the world three and twenty years. That it has attracted little notice, and still less popular favour--though it may have excited in the writer some mortification--has not occasioned much surprise. The doctrine it seeks to establish is in direct opposition to popular and deep-rooted prejudice. It is thought (most erroneously) to attack the best enjoyments and most solid comforts of life; and, moreover, it has excited the bitter hostility of a numerous and influential body in society--I mean that body of medical practitioners who exercise their profession for the sake of its profits merely, and who appear to think that disease was made for the profession and not the profession for disease.