Diseases of the Throat and Lungs (1873)

AUTHOR: Trall, Russell Thacher

KEYWORDS: dress reform, food, health, water-cure

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

The material in this small book was first published in The Water-Cure Journal. Individual chapters deal with respiratory diseases such as consumption, diphtheria, and pneumonia. The booklet also includes chapters on diet, clothing, and drink. In his "Preliminary Remarks," Trall describes the diseases as “the maladies of what is called civilization” and “the scourges of fashionable society,” which are multiplying “with the enervating habits and unphysiological refinements of artificial life” (7). He rejects all current ("allopathic") medical treatments out of hand – “[t]hey never have cured a single case, and they never will” (8) – and promotes instead the water-cure.

Proper diet is particularly important in the treatment of consumption, and an improper diet is often among its causes. He condemns the dietary recommendations of “the allopathic school” as “the vilest trash that ever entered the human stomach,” singling out “[m]ilk, flesh, grease, gravies, pork, hog’s lard, cod-liver oil, and alcohol” as particularly dangerous (25). According to Trall, only food that “will supply the purest tissue with the least wear and tear of the vital machinery is the best,” which means “a simple fruit and farinaceous diet” (26). For bread, only “pure grain and water, unsophisticated by salt, sugar, or shortenings, and unperverted by yeast, acids, or alkalies” should be used (26). Milk is “highly objectionable, as are all of its products – butter, cheese, cream, and buttermilk” (26). Trall considers the continued consumption of milk beyond a certain infantile stage of development is “a perversion of organic law,” even more so when “the human being resorts to the milk of other animals” (26). 

He is convinced that “[t]he flesh, milk, and secretions of animals devoured by other animals would necessarily tend to amalgamate, as it were, all distinctive forms of structure, so that, eventually, all the animals on the earth would become mixed breeds and monstrosities” (26). This is particularly dangerous for humans, which Trall believes are the pinnacle of creation. The human “is on so high a plane above all else … that its higher and better nature requires an abstinence from all the secretions of other animals” (26). In addition, “[t]he milch [sic] cow is always a diseased animal” (26). Trall notes that this is primarily because cows need to be artificially induced to produce milk: “[C]ontrary to the rules and design of nature,” he writes,

they must be abnormally and constantly excited, and the product is necessarily more or less diseased. And the offspring of cows who are milked ten or eleven months in the year are deprived thereby of as wholesome food as they otherwise would have; and hence the practice of milking cows in order to feed human beings not only depraves the human being, but also deteriorates the animals themselves. What woman whose breasts were so preternaturally and morbidly excited as to be forced to yield milk for other purposes than the nourishment of her own progeny, could supply a pure and wholesome article for her child? The idea is preposterous. Yet it is not more absurd than is the practice of deriving that supply from animals which are kept in a morbid condition for the very purposes of affording it (27).

Trall deems current fashions, particularly for women and girls, to be utterly detrimental to general health, and dangerous in cases of respiratory and other illnesses:

The ordinary dress of females in all civilized countries is as well calculated to restrain the free action of the limbs, contract the chest, weaken the respiratory muscles, and expose them to colds, as could well be devised. It is not to be wondered at that our fashionably- dressed American ladies are so disinclined to walking, and so prone to sedentary habits. It is impossible for them, in their present style of dress, to go out, unless the weather is particularly fair, or to walk much without great fatigue and exhaustion (24).