SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited by Deborah Madsen):

Published the year before his early death, Joel Shew claims this to be “the most full and explicit” popular work on the water-cure (iii). His aim is primarily “to teach the people the prevention of disease” (iii.), thus the book is a large catalog of all kinds of disease and ailments and the water-cure treatment prescribed for each. As Shew succinctly puts it, the water-cure uses for its “prophylactics and medicaments” simple “water, air, exercise, and diet” (iii.). Specific applications and combinations of these four elements are recommended for specific diseases. This means that Shew's dietary recommendations are made in the context of specific diseases or individual cases. For example, Shew holds that in the case of diarrhea, a “[v]egetarian diet is especially favorable” (315) and that “[a] consistent vegetarian never gets dysentery” (323). Quoting William Lambe, he claims that a “strict vegetarian diet has in some cases cured cancer” and that “Dr. Lambe has well shown the effects of exclusive vegetable food and distilled water in mitigating this disease” (584).

In the chapter on “The Hunger-Cure” Shew offers general remarks on diet, noting that he is “an advocate of what is popularly termed the vegetarian system, or, in other words, of the doctrine that it is not natural for man to eat flesh” (797). He presents anatomical and physiological arguments in favor of veganism by comparing human anatomy, particularly with respect to teeth, to the orangutan. Shew claims that “all well-ascertained physiological, pathological, chemical, and, I may add, moral and intellectual evidence, goes to establish the position I have taken in regard to the natural dietetic character of the race” (801). 

An appended chapter “On the Formation and Management of Water-Cure Establishments” concludes the book.