Physiology, Animal and Mental (1847)

AUTHOR: Fowler, Orson Squire

The book expounds the phrenological viewpoint on the mind-body relation and the corresponding teachings on health with a view to both physiological and moral implications (because phrenology essentializes morality in physiology). It also touches on the question of nutrition and diet, which assume a central role with respect to morality as well as physical and mental health. Although Fowler admits that “man is well nigh omnivorous” (55), he advocates clearly for a vegan diet. According to Fowler, plant-based food is simply “the food best for mind and body” (60). This is because

the constitutional effect of animal food is to excite the animal propensities more, relatively, than the moral sentiments and intellect, is established by the natural history of the entire animal kingdom, and by the universal experience of mankind, both in masses and individuals. As the natural diet of all animals is constitutionally calculated to develop their respective natures, and as the paramount characteristic of all carnivorous animals is rapacity and ferocity, therefore animal food, eaten by man, naturally and necessarily develops a like rapacious fierceness in him also; whereas a vegetable diet is constitutionally adapted to foster docility and goodness. If any do not like this result they cannot get by that law on which it is based, that the natural diet of all animals is constitutionally adapted to sustain the peculiarities of their respective natures (63).

Thus, humans “cannot eat flesh without developing ferocity” (64) because meat-eating fosters violence. Fowler underscores this point with his anti-semitic convictions about “animal and man-slaughtering Jews” and their “bloodthirsty disposition” (66). He also launches into a racist diatribe about Native Americans' alleged eating habits:

The warwhoop Indian lives mainly by the chase, and behold his unrelenting revenge. See him bury his teeth in the live flesh of his captured enemy, and, tiger-like, suck out his warm blood, exultingly exclaiming, “The sweetest morsel I ever tasted.” Hear him pow-wow around his helpless victims, and, fiend-like, torture them by slow degrees to death, by the most excruciating cruelties possible to inflict. Revenge is the food of the soul whenever flesh is that of the body. Savage ferocity is the natural product of animal food (66-67).

The “New Zealand cannibal, who eats little but meat, and even his OWN RACE” (67), serves him as another racist example. Conversely, Fowler emphasizes the “peaceable character” of the “vegetable-eating nations”: Egyptians, Hindoo, Chinese, Japanese (66, 67).

Meat-eating also promotes immorality, a fact for which the slaughterhouse, blunting our “finer moral feelings” (76), is a particularly gruesome example. For Fowler, it is “the CONSUMER” who is “the real slaughterer” and thus “bears chief responsibility” (77), though Fowler does not absolve the butcher, whom he compares to the “vender of intoxicating drinks”: He is “a VOLUNTARY doer of wrong” (77). The “guilt of the consumer does not lessen the sin of the butcher” (77). Conversely, veganism promotes morality (94-96). Fowler is convinced that meat-eating shortens life expectancy (80-81), that human teeth are not made to process meat (81-85), that veganism is agriculturally much more economical because meat production demands more resources such as land and labor (85-88), that plant foods taste better while meat actually blunts taste (88-94), and that a purely vegan diet is sufficiently nutritious (97-99).

Fowler points to the health and general well-being of prominent vegans of his time, such as Sylvester Graham, whom he characterizes as “sprightly and young in constitution” (70), even growing “younger in constitution as he becomes older in years” (71), despite the fact that “he was once a confirmed invalid” (70). He also reports on the experiences of William Metcalfe and the Philadelphia Bible Christians (72-75). Interestingly (and ironically), Graham serves as a prominent example against veganism, due to Graham's premature death, in Fowler's much later Human Science, or, Phrenology (1873) in which he renounces his earlier vegan conviction, arguing for a mixed diet instead. In Physiology, Animal and Mental, however, he is adamant that “the natural dietetic character of man is farinaceous [i.e. vegan]” (96).