Smith, Ellen Goodell (1835-1906)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Ellen Goodall was born on 25 August 1835 in Belchertown, Massachusetts, and died on 3 November 1906. She was active in hydropathic circles and acquainted with the prominent water-cure practitioners and theorists. After training as a hydrotherapist she worked with Russell Trall and became resident physician at his sanitarium in Philadelphia in 1864. In 1868, with her husband Dr. John Brown Smith, Smith established the first hydropathic clinic in Saint Paul, Minnesota. While, in some of her writing, she acknowledges that a shift from a carnist to a vegan diet may need to be gradual for those who find habit-change challenging, she is critical of  those who call themselves "vegetarians" yet consume animal products like fish, milk, and eggs and in so doing treat other-than-human creatures as "machines" for the production of food for humans. She authored the cookbook, The Fat of the Land and How to Live on It  in 1896, which has been described as an early vegan cookbook. In this book she explains: "It is the province of this book to assert that one can live, and live well, even after excluding from their diet all animal products, but also to recommend that this change be made gradually" (55). The chapter "Milk and the Cow," for instance, recommends the refusal of dairy products and butter, cream, milk, salt and sugar are not used in her recipes. Her commitment to humane values and Temperance principles led her to an anti-militarist, pacifist stance that is presented as the outcome of ethical vegan practice.

IMAGE: Ellen Goodell Smith, 1896. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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