SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In the Preface to the American Edition, Nichols characterizes the book as a “private treatise” and a “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL PROFESSIONAL CONSULTATION BETWEEN PHYSICIAN AND PATIENT.” The book is not intended “for the centre-table, the library shelf, or the counter of a bookseller” (iii). It is, rather, meant for the patient's private perusal. The aim is “not to attract patients, but to keep them away; and to enable them to get health without my further care,” that is, “[i]t is a book for the prevention of disease; for the preservation of health; and, as far as that end can be attained, for its restoration” (iv). Nichols then provides his extended understanding of health and medicine:

As the material basis of all reform, and all progress of humanity toward its true destiny, the world wants health. Individuals are sick, communities are sick, nations are sick. The very earth is diseased. All must be cured together; but the work must begin with the individual. Every man who purifies and invigorates his own life, does something for the world. Every woman who lives in the conditions of health, and avoids the causes of disease, helps the race; and if such persons combine their purified and invigorated lives in healthy offspring, they do a noble work for the redemption of universal humanity (iv-v).

Nichols expresses his hope that the book might thus contribute to the “real, physical redemption for mankind, out of which will be developed all moral excellence, intellectual elevation, social harmony, and individual and general happiness” (v).

In the Preface to the English Edition, Nichols claims that the American edition sold “a hundred thousand copies” (vi). He also gives the context within which it was devised, namely as a textbook on health for his teaching at the American Hydropathic Institute in New York. According to Nichols, the new edition eliminates “all the errors of twenty years ago” and integrates new “truths” (vii). It also serves as a “companion” volume to his Human Physiology as  “[i]t treats more particularly of disease, and more practically of treatment – especially of the conditions and diseases of the reproductive system, and of gestation and childbirth,” while Human Physiology is more concerned with “Social Science” (vi).

In twenty-four chapters the book covers the relation of the human to nature and the universe at large, human anatomy and physiology, sexuality and reproduction, health and disease, the water-cure, specific diseases and their water-cure treatments, childbearing and child-rearing, and death and immortality, in this order.

For Nichols, it is clear that humans' relation to the “universe is, or should be, harmonious, and that a beautiful harmony pervades all nature, marking it as a work of design” (1-2). Health, then, names the state in which we conform to this design, in which we are “in harmony with nature,” that is, “in harmony with God, the Author of all harmonies” (2). Next to air and exercise, nutrition and diet are central factors contributing to or, conversely, weakening our condition of health. Nichols holds that in principle, “[s]o far as nutrition is concerned, it makes no difference whether we eat vegetable food or animal, only that it is purest at first hand, while the flesh of animals is always more or less tainted with disease or diseasing impurities” (13). In other words, veg*ism is conducive to health. It is also our natural diet. It is worth quoting in full Nichols' elaboration of this point:

Now what are the natural tastes and attractions of man in respect to food. Reader, you shall be my judge. Let me take you by the hand, and lead you into this garden. It shall be, if you please, the Garden of Eden. Trees loaded with fruit are around you – vines bending with luscious grapes, beds filled with melons. Here are apples, pears, peaches, plums, nectarines, grapes, figs, oranges, bananas, strawberries, raspberries, and more than I can count. Here, also, are esculent roots, and nutritious seeds, fields of waving grain or golden maize, potatoes, beets, turnips. The air is filled with delicious odours; every object is full of beauty. Happy children are gathering fruit, or plucking flowers. All around are life and harmony, sweetness and purity, peace and happiness. The farm, the garden, the orchard, the vineyard, are full of beautiful associations, and not one object, if it properly belongs there, is offensive to the most refined taste.

    Now, let us look upon another picture: A foetid, sickening odour fills the air; shrieks and moans of agony salute you; the gutters run full of blood, but you must enter. A raging bull, with his frenzied eye glaring upon his murderers, is dragged up with horrid bellowings; a dull blow falls upon his skull, and the blood gushes from his throat. The strong, honest ox, who has toiled all his life for man, is murdered. The timid sheep, with painful bleatings, now feels the knife at its throat, and gasps away its innocent life. Calves, torn from their mothers, are hung up by their feet, their veins opened, and allowed to slowly bleed to death, that the veal may be white, drained of its blood, and tender, from the long death-agonies. Around you are the opened carcases of these, your fellow-creatures, and your friends – the floor is covered with their blood and entrails.

    What sense is gratified by such a scene as this? Is it beautiful to the sight, pleasant to the ear, grateful to the smell, or does it awaken any calm or happy feeling?

    If a man wished to take a walk with one he loved, would he go to a garden, or a slaughter-house? If he wished to send her a present, would it be a basket of fruit, or a string of sausages? (156-157)

The answer to these rhetorical questions is clear. “Flesh-eating physiologists and physicians” may well “have contended for the necessity, if not the beauty, of eating animal food,” Nichols continues, “but all experience, all science, and all philosophy, are arrayed against them” (157).

He then offers additional evidence both for the naturalness and appropriateness of a plant-based diet:

At this moment, and in all past time, nine-tenths of the whole human race have lived on a vegetable diet, either eating no flesh or making it the rare exception. The great mass of the labour of the world is done on a vegetable diet. In Japan, China, the whole East Indies, Persia, Turkey, all Europe, save the sea-coasts, all Africa, and Central America, flesh is seldom or never eaten by the poor, and over much of this territory, not even by the rich. The finest forms, the best teeth, the strongest muscles, the most active limbs in the world, are fed on a purely vegetable diet; while with regard to intellectual and moral development, it is a curious and interesting fact, that there can scarcely be mentioned a great philosopher or poet of ancient or modern times who has not given his testimony, either in his opinions or his practice, in favour of a vegetarian diet (157-158).

To sum up, for Nichols,

[f]ruit and the farinacea are the natural, and, therefore, the most healthy food for man. They are best fitted to sustain him in vigour of body and mind. They preserve him in health, and enable him to recover from disease. They contain all the elements he requires in the best proportions and in the best condition. A vegetarian diet is preeminently the diet of beauty, energy, activity, and enjoyment. It is the best at all ages, in all conditions, in all employments (158-159).

The best possible diet that is “most consistent with health,” Nichols suggests, is “ripe fruits, as strawberries, raspberries, whortleberries, peaches, pears, apples, grapes, melons, tomatoes, oranges, bananas, figs, dates; wheat, Indian corn, rice, oatmeal, rye, barley; peas, beans, lentiles [sic]; asparagus, potatoes, beets, turnips, squash, cabbage, salsify, egg-plant, etc., etc.” (159). He is convinced that

the most perfect farinaceous food is unbolted wheat, either boiled or made into bread. Men can live very well on ten or twelve ounces of wheat a-day, with water for drink. Less wheat, with a portion of fruit, however, is better. Coarse wheat bread, or porridge, fruit, a little milk, make a beautiful and excellent diet. Maize is nearly as good as wheat – it may be even better for some constitutions. With it we can better do without milk or its products (161).

A plant-based diet is also by “far the cheapest” as nothing “costs so much, in soil, and labour, and care, as flesh” (162). Nichols goes on to present a wealth of historical and trans-cultural evidence for all these points.

Additionally, veganism helps to curb sexual desire, particularly during puberty and the awakening of “the sexual instinct, which may be a cause of disease, impotence, epilepsy, insanity; and, in any case, of life-long regrets. The remedy is to know and guard against the danger, and to keep a perpetual activity of body and mind, with great temperance in food and drink” (85). More concretely, “[p]erfect temperance, and even abstinence, or a pure, bland, simple, and very spare diet – bread, fruit, and cooling vegetables for food, and water for drink, with the love and desire of purity, and a varied activity of body and mind, are the best remedies” (120). Conversely,

[c]ertain kinds of food and drinks stimulate the amative propensity and its organism. “Oysters and eggs are amatory food,” which is also true of game, fish, and of animal food generally; whose effect is much increased by salt, pepper, and spices. Coffee and chocolate and all rich wines have the same effect. Strong coffee is one of the most active of amatory stimulants. Alcohol does not so much stimulate lust, as dull the sense of caution, and the scruples that restrain men and women from enjoyment (120).

A vegan diet specifically is the diet of choice for pregnant women: “The food of the mother,” Nichols writes, “has so much to do with the condition of the child, and with her power to bring it forth at the proper period without pain or danger, that few things are more important. Numerous experiments prove that a fruit diet, or one composed chiefly of fruit, is the best possible” (150). Once more, animal food is the worst option. “No well-informed human mother,” Nichols continues, “will live on the flesh of animals during either gestation or lactation” (150). In all cases, “[t]he best cures are made upon a simple vegetable diet” (219).