PUBLICATION: The Debilities of Our Boys and the Early Decay of Our Young Men. Dansville, NY: Austin, Jackson & Co., 1872.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuc.5469267_001&view=1up&seq=1

 

Fowler, Orson Squire. Amativeness
Graham, Sylvester. A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity

Jackson, James Caleb. American Womanhood
---. Consumption
---. How to Cure Drunkards
---. The Gluttony Plague
---. The Sexual Organism
---. The Training of Children
Kellogg, John Harvey.
Trall, Russel Thacher. Home Treatment for Sexual Abuses
White, Ellen Gould Harmon. An Appeal to Mothers

 

In this booklet, Jackson directly addresses the “youth of the republic,” as in the title of the first chapter (7). He promotes a meatless diet for the young in order to promote their physical and moral or mental health. For Jackson, physical health is the precondition for intellectual and moral uprightness: “Good physical health is a necessary substratum to high character” (12). The first cause of ill health that Jackson considers is “bad dietetics”: “I know of nothing more deplorable when it is considered from a philosophical point of view (for philosophy always with reference to human welfare, considers the material as well as the spiritual conditions of life for mankind), than the way in which from the birth of children, until puberty, their parents feed them” (14). Jackson singles out “flesh meats” as particularly pernicious (15) but staple items of everyday nutrition in the US. It is thus imperative “to alter the nature and quality of foods” (18). In addition, the young should never consume “tea or coffee” or any alcoholic beverages such as “beer, cider, or wine” (20). Meat, spices, any “stimulating foods” (30) also incite sexual desires, particularly masturbation, a habit that impedes “progress in the boy's conception of moral truth” (28) and leads to “mental and moral abnormities” (33), as well as a plethora of physical diseases and ailments (Jackson provides a long and specific list of these, 32-33). In the case of “involuntary seminal losses” (62), Jackson recommends a fully vegan diet: “Animal foods, even in so simple a form as that of eggs, is not so good as foods made out of grains and fruits, and vegetables simply cooked” (63).

 

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