SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

This is both a “Hand-Book of Health” and a biography of Mary Sargeant Gove Nichols, “a record of her heroic life, and most useful work for women, and thereby for humanity” (v). As Thomas Low Nichols points out, much of it is distilled from Mary S. G. Nichols' Lectures to Women on Anatomy and Physiology, Experience in Water-Cure, “her contributions to the 'Herald of Health'” (v), and other papers (indeed, long stretches of text are direct quotations).

The volume covers Mary S. G. Nichols' childhood and early adult life in New England, her time in New York, her spiritualism and conversion to Catholicism, the Nichols' short stint in Ohio, their emigration to England, Mary S. G. Nichols' take on and practice in dietetics and the water-cure, her focus on the health of women and children, including child-bearing and education, the Nichols' understanding of marriage and sexuality, their take on government and politics, and Mary S. G. Nichols' literary ambitions and career. As T. L. Nichols sums up, she

was neighbour and friend of ALCOTT and EMERSON, a pupil of HENRY G. WRIGHT, and through him of the mystic GREAVES, and had attended the lectures of SYLVESTER GRAHAM. Needless to say that she was an enthusiastic Vegetarian, who at the period of her departure from this life had not tasted flesh meat for fifty years. She believed that by means of a pure diet and her daily bath she had conquered, at least that she had kept at bay, her threatening hereditary diseases – consumption and cancer (56).

The Nichols' veganism is based on the conviction that the “matter of diet and digestion is very important, because life, health, power to think, to work, to enjoy, depend upon it” (58). As both repeatedly point out in their respective publications,

[t]he natural food of man is in infancy the milk secreted by mother or nurse, or the milk of some animal of similar constitution as a substitute. After the period of infancy the natural food of man is similar to that of the animals he most closely resembles – fruits, nuts, porridge or bread made of the seeds of grasses; rice, wheat, rye, barley, oats maize, and a variety of tubers, like the potato; and roots, like the beet, carrot, parsnip; bulbs, like onions; greens, like spinach, cabbage, etc., etc. – an immense variety of pure and healthy food, sufficient for all his wants (58).

Thomas Nichols concedes that Mary Nichols “was not, however, so complete and thorough-going a vegetarian as many have been and are. She ate some animal products – milk, cream, butter, cheese, and eggs, and even fish; making a distinction between the warm and cold blooded animals – our more distant and nearer relations” (223). Nichols himself emphasizes “the moral ground for vegetarianism,” namely that no animal should be killed needlessly, that it is certainly not necessary to do so for the sake of nutrition, quite the contrary, and that “Eden had no butcheries” (he is quoting himself here (229). Overall, in order to retain or, if lost, attain the condition of health, the following points need to be observed: “to breathe pure air; to drink pure water; to eat moderately of the natural food of man, as furnished purely and bountifully from the vegetable kingdom; to give to all the faculties of body and mind their natural activity; to will and to do; to know and to love” (330).

In relation to marriage and sexuality, the Nichols insist on restraint and chastity, while advocating for the rights of women. He writes:

The law [of sexuality] is union for reproduction. The human practice is union for pleasure, leading to great disorders, excesses, waste of life, nervous exhaustion, and diseases in both sexes, but especially in women, who are, as as a rule, with notable exceptions, less sensual than men, but who become, under the rule of marriage, the slaves and victims of those who should love and protect them.
    By the marriage laws of Christendom, the wife is compelled to satisfy her husband, while either one or the other can go to the law courts and bring a suit for marital rights. I cannot see the difference between legal compulsion and felonious rape. The desire and the happiness of marriage should be mutual. The relation of man to woman should be deferent and chivalric; and her wish, in regard to the function whose burthens and sufferings fall upon her, should be his only law (270).

At the same time, Nichols holds that “the end of marriage is to have children.” Consequently, he continues, “no woman who marries can refuse to have at least two children” (279).