A Lecture to Young Men, on Chastity (1838)
AUTHOR: Graham, Sylvester
KEYWORDS: diet, food, Graham system, masturbation, sexuality
---. Lectures on the Science of Human Life
---. The Aesculapian Tablets of the Nineteenth Century
White, Ellen Gould Harmon. An Appeal to Mothers
Graham recommends a vegan diet to control sexual desires, particularly masturbation. Like many of his nineteenth-century peers (such as Orson Squire Fowler and Russell Thacher Trall), Graham promotes temperance in sexual matters, particularly with respect to masturbation or “self-pollution” (24 and passim). And, like his peers, he is convinced that a correct diet is crucial when it comes “to remedy and prevent” (13) these practices. It is at least partly due to the “stimulating and depraving diet” of youth that “their animal propensities are much more rapidly developed than are their rational and moral powers” (60). The “proper system of diet,” in turn, both improves “their health exceedingly” and “subdue[s] their sexual propensity,” so that they are able to “preserve entire chastity of body, for several months in succession, without the least inconvenience, and without any separation from their companion” (80). In addition to “active exercise in the open air” and, if needed, a “cold bath” (86), the following dietary recommendations apply:
- avoidance of “stimulating condiments” (115);
- “coffee, tea, rich pastry, and compounded and concentrated forms of food” (152) should also be avoided;
- reliance on predominantly “[f]arinaceous food,” particularly “good bread, made of coarsely ground, unbolted wheat, or rye meal, and hominy, made of cracked wheat or rye, or Indian corn” (146);
- “[n]o animal food [...] should be used, in any quantity” (147).
Only if a patient's condition has already improved, “he may gradually relax the rigor of his diet, and take a greater variety of simple vegetables and fruits; but still, he had better never go beyond the vegetable kingdom and pure water, for his aliment” (151). Generally, “our boys and students,” Graham writes, “should always subsist on a plain, simple, unstimulating, vegetable and water diet; and care should be taken that they do not eat too fast, and are not excessive in quantity” (156). Only then will “our race [...] be saved from innumerable sufferings and calamities, and greatly improved in all their physical, intellectual and moral faculties” (164).