Hydropathy for the People (1855)

AUTHOR: Trall, Russell Thacher

KEYWORDS: food, health, morality, religion, water-cure

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

In his notes to this American edition of Horsell's book, Trall adds his own observations on sundry matters related to the water-cure, including, dietary recommendations. Trall insists that “grains and fruits” are “the natural food of man” (213) and he rejects the use of any animal food. His criticism of the production of milk and beef is particularly stark:

In the cities of New-York and Brooklyn, and in the village of Williamsburg, many thousands of cows are kept in close, ill-ventilated, and horribly filthy stables, fed on distillery slops, and every other kind of foul, refuse material; and their milk, which is an absolute poison, is sold to our citizens, and swallowed by our infantile population. The animals thus treated soon become diseased, when they are killed, and their carcasses peddled out to the people, under the name of beef (212).

Trall writes that “old, rich, strong cheese, is, in my judgment, one of the most indigestible, injurious, I had almost said poisonous, articles of diet known” (220). He condemns the use of “any stimulating substance, as brandy, pepper, mustard; or alkaline material, as soda, magnesia, saleratus; or greasy compound, as fat pork, bacon, cod liver oil” (215) and “the use of calomel and opium as remedies, or fat pork and bacon as victuals” he calls “a mischievous practice” (217).

Trall is convinced that veganism is consistent with both religion and nature, and offers a practical solution to questions of over-population and the misuse of land:

When men live according to the laws of their being, extreme wealth and extreme poverty, by which one portion of mankind are pampered to death and the other starved, will soon cease to exist; and there will be no more trouble about either excessive or deficient population. Look over the world. In some of the European nations, it takes the labor of a hundred or a thousand peasants, or serfs, to maintain one young sprig of nobility in a life of fashionable dissipation. In nearly all countries, a vast amount of toil and talent is wasted in miscultivating the earth for tobacco, coffee, tea, and other injurious narcotics and nervines; and an immense amount of the natural food of the human family, grains and fruits, is manufactured into alcoholic poisons. So long as man ravages the earth instead of ruling it, so long as he plays tyrant instead of lord over it, and over the rest of the animal creation, so long will the theory of population be an unsolved problem, to those who cannot distinguish between man's transgressions and God's designs (222).

For Trall, it follows that “the reformer of the present day, be he theological or physiological” needs to “set up a standard of moral life, or a law of eating and drinking, in all respects strictly adapted to the ways of God and nature” (223).