In the _Travels of Lemuel Gulliver_ the reader will find the _sæva indignatio_ of Swift--or, at all events, of the Houyhnhnms--amongst other things, launched against the indiscriminating diet of his countrymen:--
“I told him” [the Master-Horse], says Gulliver, “we fed on a thousand things which operated contrary to each other--that we eat when we are not hungry, and drink without the provocation of thirst ... that it would be endless to give him a catalogue of all diseases incident to human bodies, for they could not be fewer than five or six hundred, spread over every limb and joint--in short, every part, external and intestine, having diseases appropriated to itself--to remedy which there was a sort of people bred up among us in the profession or pretence of curing the sick.”
Among the infinite variety of remedies and prescriptions, in the human _Materia Medica_, the astounded Houyhnhnm learns, are reckoned “serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men’s flesh and bones, birds, beasts, fishes”--no mere travellers’ tales (it is perhaps necessary to explain), but sober fact, as any one may discover for himself by an examination of some of the received and popular medical treatises of the seventeenth century, in which the most absurd “prescriptions,” involving the most frightful cruelty, are recorded with all seriousness:--
“My master, continuing his discourse, said there was nothing that rendered the Yahoos more odious than their undistinguishing appetite to devour everything that came in their way, whether herbs, roots, berries, the _corrupted flesh of animals, or all mingled together_; and that it was peculiar in their temper that they were fonder of what they could get by rapine or stealth at a greater distance than much better food provided for them at home. If their prey held out, they would eat till they were ready to burst.”
Although unaccustomed to the better living, and finding it “insipid at first,” the human slave of the Houyhnhnm (a word which, by the way, in that language, means “the perfection of nature”) records as the result of his experience, in the first place, how little will sustain human life; and, in the second place, the fact of the superior healthfulness of the vegetable food.[148]