Digestion and Dyspepsia (1873)

AUTHOR: Trall, Russell Thacher

KEYWORDS: digestion, disease, food, health, water-cure

Trine, Ralph Waldo. The Power that Wins

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

In this book, Trall promotes veganism to prevent and treat dyspepsia and related diseases. In the Introduction, he notes that “[t]he American race must arrest its dyspeptic tendency, or die out. The Irish, the German, and other foreign races, of nerve, stomachs and muscle, and of more ability to maintain vitality in themselves and transmit it to offspring, will ere long possess the land, unless our devitalizing habits are reformed” (9). The proper prevention and treatment of dyspepsia is thus urgent. Trall stresses the issue of nutrition and diet when he remarks that “[i]mperfect nutrition is the very essence of the long catalogue of chronic diseases which are said to consist in a 'depraved habit of body,' 'plethora' 'anaemia,' scrofula, scurvy, and other morbid diatheses” (8). Treatment of these ailments and diseases primarily consists in diet: “A correct dietary,” he writes, “should be placed at the head of all of our therapeutic measures; for without this all other appliances may fail, and certainly will fail to afford more than temporary benefit” (115).

In addition to improper diet, tobacco use and unnatural posture, together with tight-lacing, are prominent causes of dyspepsia (61-67, 67-81). While stimulants like alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea are bad, medicines are even worse: “Bad as liquor and tobacco are, purgatives are much worse. A majority of persons may take an ordinary drink or dose of rum, brandy, gin, or whisky, three times a day with less injury to the health, than are doses of jalap and cream of tartar, senna and salts, castor oil, or any of the multitudinous aperient, purgative, bilious, or anti-bilious pills that are swallowed by hundreds of tons annually” (87). In most cases, “plain simple food, tepid bathings, and active manipulations to the skin, with no medicine of any kind” (109), are the best treatments. “And all food should be plain, simple, of a consistence to insure proper mastication, and of but few articles at a single meal” (115). “[W]holesome bread” made of “unbolted meal and water” is “of the first importance” (116, 115). He suggests the addition of “dates, raisins, figs, or other sweet fruits” to make “wholesome fruit-cake” (117). He also recommends “hominy, samp, oatmeal, mush, boiled rice,” potato soup and other vegetable soups, and in general “the fruits and vegetables in our markets” (118). Trall voices a clear preference for “an exclusively vegetarian diet” and with respect to condiments he advises “the less the better” (119).

The book ends with a curious Appendix consisting of a short article on the “Death of Horace Greeley,” in which Trall accuses Greeley's doctors of hastening his death through their treatment, contending “that all of the medication” Greeley received, “so far as it has been published, was worse than useless” and Greeley was effectively “drugged to stupefaction” (156) and, ultimately, to death.