Health: Its Friends and Its Foes (1862)

AUTHOR: Mussey, Reuben Dimond

PUBLICATION: Health: Its Friends and Its Foes. Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1862.
https://archive.org/details/healthitsfriend00mussgoog

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

The book explicitly advocates veganism as both the healthiest and the most ethical diet. As stated in the Preface, Mussey collects the results and insights from his experience of “more than thirty years” as a physician (v), presenting a series of case studies. Divided into twenty-five short chapters, in addition to promoting Temperance (including abstention from tobacco, tea, and coffee) and dress reform, he focuses predominantly on questions of diet, defending the view that humans are vegans by nature.

In relation to dress reform, Mussey not only criticizes any kind of tight lacing, particularly of corsets, due to health reasons, but explicitly notes the ethical and religious repercussions of the practice:

Is there no moral aspect belonging to this custom of tight dressing? By what right may I violate a law of my physical being, when the tendency of the violation is to enfeeble health and shorten life? Who made the human body? it is fitting to ask, if the edicts of fashion are to be listened to, and its hideous transformations sought after and received with more than religious devotion. No! the machinery of the human body was not made by an apprentice; it came from the hand of a Master, – one who understood and established all the sympathies and relations of its internal parts to each other and to external objects. … Fathers, mothers, take care how you mar God's workmanship (28).

Mussey is a fierce supporter of Temperance, opposing any use of alcohol, coffee, and tea while promoting the exclusive use of water, “the simple and safe beverage prepared for Man by the benevolent Creator” (88). Mussey defends veganism on the grounds that humans are plant-eaters by nature, providing both Biblical and physiological evidence: “On the subject of the natural food of man we have two revelations, both from the same source, and in strict accordance with each other: –  one, in the account given of man in the book of Genesis; the other, in the form and adaptation of the organs employed in preparing the food for digestion and nutrition” (177). He suggests flesh-eating as a deciding factor in causing “the judgment of heaven in the form of a flood” (177):

Now it will be readily admitted that no community of men can become so savage, ferocious, and wicked, under the influence of a well-chosen vegetable diet, with water for the only drink, as under flesh-eating and the use of intoxicating drinks. If they made themselves vile and wicked by all the means which human ingenuity could invent, it is natural to infer that fermented liquors, narcotics, and flesh-eating, with all their exciting and maddening influences, were in general use (178).

“Vegetable products,” he remarks, simply “contain all the materials of nutrition required by the human constitution” (224). No other food besides plant-based foods is needed. Flesh-foods are also much more prone to produce disease (230-232). Extensive sections of the book are reserved for accounts of diseases that result from the use of meat and, conversely, of cases in which a vegetable diet worked well as remedy.  

Mussey also inveighs against gluttony or “[l]arge feeding” (194), which “a strictly vegetable diet” helps to counteract (195). Generally, he thinks that “simplicity of diet is consistent with the highest and most uninterrupted health” (218). He also insists that  “vegetable food is more economical than animal food, or the mixed diet which is recommended by certain physiologists, in all climates where the esculent roots, pulpy fruits, and the grains can be cultivated” (219). He maintains, for example, that “[i]f a simple vegetable diet could prevail in our literary institutions, more than twice the present number of young men could receive the benefits of a liberal education, and much more mental power be brought to bear upon our communities” (221).

A vegetable diet is also morally superior: “The gentler passions, such as pity, love, benevolence, etc., are admitted to be more in accordance with the teachings of the highest wisdom than those of hatred, anger, and revenge, and that the former are more developed by a vegetable, and the latter by a mixed or a carnivorous diet, no man can doubt” (232), Mussey writes, maintaining that “nations living wholly or mostly upon flesh are cruel, inhospitable, brutal, and degraded” (233). The book also contains an autobiographical chapter on how Mussey himself gave up the eating of flesh as an experiment, without determining for how long he would continue. "I was then actively engaged in professional labor, and was unable at any subsequent period to decide that I had lost anything either in strength or activity. The state of my nerves was in a few weeks so much unproved, that I determined to persevere. I soon lost my relish for the flesh of land animals, but never wholly for fresh fish, although I tasted it but once for sixteen years (340-341).