Tryon, Thomas (1634-1703)
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Thomas Tryon was born on 6 September 1634 in Bibury, England and died on 21 August 1703 in Hackney, London. Self-taught, he worked spinning wool and then as a shepherd before moving to London to become an apprentice hatter. It was in the hat trade that he found financial success. Tryon experienced a spiritual awakening in the form of a "Voice of Wisdom" that called him to a life of frugality. He is remembered as the author of conduct and advice manuals, many of them published by the Quaker publisher Andrew Sowl, that promote Temperance, health and nutrition, veganism, and animal rights, as well as the abolition of slavery and environmentalism. Thomas Tryon was a significant influence on the Quaker Abolitionist and ethical vegan Benjamin Lay (1682-1759). According to Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, it was the experience of reading Tryon's The Way to Health (1682) – the second edition of Health's Grand Preservative; or, The Women's Best Doctor (1682) – that encouraged his own experiment in veganism.
An extensive contemporary critique of Tryon's veganism is John Field's The absurdity & falsness of Thomas Trion's doctrine manifested in forbidding to eat flesh, contrary to the command of God, the example of angels, Christ Jesus, and the holy apostles: and proved to be doctrine of devils, by the testimony of Holy Scriptures ... London: Tho. Hawkins, 1685.
PUBLICATIONS
Healths Grand Preservative: or The Womens Best Doctor. A treatise, shewing the nature and operation of brandy, rumm, rack, and other distilled spirits, and the ill consequences of mens, but especially of womens drinking such pernicious liquors and smoaking tobacco. As likewise, of the immoderate eating of flesh without a due observation of time, or nature of the creature which hath proved very destructive to the health of many. Together, with a rational discourse of the excellency of herbs, highly approved of by our ancestors in former times. And the reasons why men now so much desire the flesh more than other food. A work highly fit to be persued and observed by all that love their health, and particularly necessary to the female sex, on whose good or ill constitution the health and strength, or sickness and weakness of all [cropped]sterity does in a more especial manner depend. London: Lang[ley] Curtis, 1682.
Tryon's Letters, domestick and foreign, to several persons of quality: occasionally distributed in subjects, viz., philosophical, theological, and moral. London: G. Conyers [etc.] 1700.
Tryon's Letters upon several occasions ... London: Geo. Conyers and Eliz. Harris, 1700.