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A view of diet - from the past.
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Here's an edited and provisional Wiki-view of the man.
George Cheyne (1671-1743), was a pioneering medic and early proto-psychologist, philosopher and mathematician, born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, who opened a medical practice in Bath in 1702. He is best known for his contribution to vegetarianism.
An index follows the article in the lower panel.
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The English Malady - George Cheyne
Gastronomy is life
THE ENGLISH MALADY
The English Malady; or a treatise of nervous diseases of all kinds; as spleen, vapours, lowness of spirits, hypochondriacal, and hysterical distempers, etc.
By George Cheyne
Printed for G. Strahan in Conhill and J. Leake at Bath 1784.
The following is from my manuscript of "Haggis and Other Stories - A History of Scottish Food and Hospitality". Page numbers for this extract are at the foot of each page for reference and index purposes.
© 1980 - long before the information explosion. References will follow at a later stage.
The book is held in the 6th floor collection of Edinburgh University Library and the shelf mark is EB.6168CHE. In what follows it needs to be remembered that there has been a fair amount of translation from the style of speech prevailing at the time of writing. The original work is replete with italics not to mention the use of the archaic ‘s’, almost in the form of 'f' .
The place this account has here concern a Scotsman’s view of the English sick. Although advice on proper diet has a long history in Western medicine, treatises on dietetic management, especially when combined with religious exhortation, became particularly popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
One of the most influential physicians in this connection was the Aberdonian medic and writer, George (Cheyne (1671-1743), who practised in London and Bath amongst an aristocratic and professional clientele. Cheyne, who is best known for his The English Malady recommends diet as the basic treatment of melancholy, counted amongst his friends and patients David Hume, Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, John Wesley, Alexander Pope, the Earl of Huntingdon and the Duke of Roxburgh.
Cheyne’s publications on the general benefits of diet for mental health and the beginning of his medical career.
Arriving in London at the peak of popularity for coffee-houses and taverns as professional meeting-places in the reign of Queen Anne, Cheyne fell into the company of ‘free-livers’ and ‘bottle-companions’ with the consequence that his weight rose to 448 pounds. That is 32 stone or 203 kg.
.
The glaring anomaly centres on a physician being grossly overweight advising his patient on dietary matters. However, he was sufficiently well-known to have had a London street named after him.
Having been diagnosed as a sufferer from English melancholy, Cheyne, after some experimentation, hit upon a diet of milk and vegetables combined with regular exercise, regular sleep and temperance. As a result, he enjoyed a long life of personal tranquillity and mental stability.
The book is addressed to The Right Honourable The Lord Bateman, Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath.
“The chief design of these sheets is to recommend to my fellow creatures that plain diet which is most agreeable to the purity and simplicity of uncorrupted nature, and unconquered reason”… “Prejudice, interest, appetite are powerful antagonists, which nothing but good sense, solid virtue, and true Christian courage are capable of opposing”.
Such words from the dedication serve to show the interest of this one-time Fellow of the College of Physicians at Edinburgh and Fellow of the Royal Society.
In the preface he gives reasons for the title of the work which is “a reproach universally thrown on this Island by foreigners, and all our neighbours on the continent, by whom nervous distempers, spleen, vapours, and lowness of spirits, are, in derision called the ‘English Malady’”.
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. . . . . . . . . 2
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.
He continues “ . . and I wish there were not so good grounds for this reflection”. The moisture of our air, the variableness of our weather,…The richness and heaviness of our food, the wealth and abundance of the inhabitants (from their universal trade, the inactivity and sedentary occupations of the better sort (among whom this evil mostly rages)…These nervous disorders being computed to make almost one third of the complaints of the people of condition in England."
We continue the preface where the author expounds his “experience and observations of many years”. The first proposition is “that the diet and manner of living of the middling rank, who are but moderate and temperate in foods of the common and natural product of the country, to which, in animal foods plainly dressed and liquors purify’s by fermentation only, without the torchures of the fire, or without being turned into spirits, is that intended by the Author of Nature for this climate and country, and consequently the most wholesome and fittest in general for prolonging life, and preventing distempers, that the end of providence and the conditions of mortality will admit”.
The second proposition is couched in similar language and instructs the wise man who is healthy not to “alter the kind and quality of his diet while his health and appetite are good”.
Proposition Three concerns the trying of proper medicines to counteract rather than change the quality of diet. The fourth proposition reduces to the idea that changes when made should be done by degrees “whether from a higher to a lower, or from a lower to a higher diet”.
In the fifth proposition, Cheyne makes the suggestion that “strong, high animal foods, and generous, spirituous liquors, as begetting warm, full, and enliven‘d juices, urging on the circulation with force, etc., are fittest for mechanical and animal strength,…”.
. . . . . . . . . .3
“Honest and faithful physicians” are required in the sixth proposition to prescribe a proper and specific diet for each distemper. In the seventh proposition, a very lengthy one, a “strict milk, seed and vegetable diet is required for a number of specific illnesses”.
Having completed his seven propositions, later in the preface he suggested that “none ever failed or died who entered on a milk, seed, and vegetable diet”. Perhaps he was living proof of his theory since he survived to the age of 72 despite his tonnage.
We will need to come back to a statement of the book‘s basic message in more detail but it might be said for the moment that the modern concern for food constituents may have begun as early 1784. We need to pass to the first statement relating to such a contention when we read “The reason why mineral and vegetable salts, poisons and causticks, have such immediate and sensible effects beyond animal salts, seems chiefly to be owing to their firmness and solidity,…”.
Modern sensibility suggests that we need take the discussion of poisons and ‘causticks’ no further. However, the reasons adduced for the different kinds of “salts” may occupy the minds of gastronomers, nutritionalists etc. . Any concern on reading about “Arsenick”, vitriol etc. maybe dissipated when we realise that the debate is far more chemical than health-food oriented.
Moving on, we are told about rich food.“…it is passed all doubt, from experiment, that rich foods, high sauces, aromaticks, delicacies, fine flavours and rich and generous wines, owe all their poignancy, high taste and gratefulness, to their abounding with such salts and sulphurs, in a much greater proportion than those other foods, that have lesser degree of such qualities;…”.
. . . . . . . . . . 4
Those of us interested in the history of health foods may be attracted by the index which highlights that the true cause of distempers (i.e., illnesses) amount to "1. luxury 2. an unactive sedentry or studious life and 3. living in great and populous cities”. We will need to move on for the detail concerning luxury. Coffee, tea, chocolate, and snuff are described as “otherwise innocent foods or amusements,…may have no effects…"
…Health and Life, however frail and brittle, are too strong forces to be taken or destroyed by such puny and insufficient pop gun artillery”!.
We should remember that the three beverages cited will have been the object of much discussion with many contemporaneous advocates for their elimination from the diet.
“The matters, as I take it stand thus: since our wealth has increased and our navigation has been extended, we have ransacked all the parts of the globe to bring together its whole stock of materials for riot, luxury, and to provoke excess. The tables of the rich and great (and indeed of all ranks who can afford it) are furnished with provisions of delicacy, number and plenty, sufficient to provoke, and even gauge the most large and voluptuous appetites.
"The whole controversy among us, seems to lie in outdoing one another in such kinds of perfusion. Prevention is rack’d to furnish the materials of our food the most delicate and savoury possible; instead of the plain simplicity of leaving the animals to range and feed in their proper eliment, with their natural nourishment, they are physick’d almost out of their lives (4), and made as great epicures and those that feed on them; and by storming, cramming, bleeding, lameing, sweating, purging and thrusting down such unnatural high-seasoned foods into them, the nervous diseases are produced in the animals themselves, even before they are admitted as food to those who complain of such disorders”. (5)
. . . . . . . . . . 5
“Not only the materials of luxury as such as I have described: but the manner of dressing or cooking them is carried on to an exaulted height. the ingenious mixing and compounding of sauces with foreign spices and provocatives, are contrived, not only to rouze a fickly appetite to receive the unnatural load, (7) but to render a natural good one in capable of knowing when it has enough. Since French cookery has been in such repute in England, and has been improved from Spain, Italy, Turkey, and every other country that has anything remarkably delicious, high or savoury in food, since eastern pickles and sauces have been brought to embellish our continual feasts; dressings, which was designed to assist the labour of digestion, as it is now managed, not only counteracts that design, but is becoming the most difficult, curious, ingenious, and, at the same time, one of the most profitable trades”.
One area of interest rising from the last quotation concerns establishing the extent of the highly reputed French cookery in England. Most sources seem to suggest that the turn of the twentieth century saw the increased extent of high class cookery.
. . . . . . . . 6
By way of a foot-note Cheyne gives a perhaps popular saying of the time; “Do you wonder that diseases are innumerable? We should remember that the link between disease and germs was by no means established at the time of writing his book and the saying suggests that the number of people involved in the preparation of food led to the over-complication of the cookery processes.
Taking the second cause of illness “an unactive, sedentry or studious life”, we are led into the “Common observaton, that fools, weak or stupid persons, heavy and dull soles are seldom much troubled with vapours or lowness of spirits”. Then follows an explanation of “the intellectual faculty” which perhaps reduces to “The works of imagination and memory, of study, thinking, and reflecting, from what ever source the principle on which they depend springs must necessarily require bodily organs”.
“… the organs of these faculties being by warm and spoiled, must effect and deaden the whole system, and lay a foundation for the diseases of bones and weakness. Add to this that those who are likliest to excell and apply in this manner, are most capable and most inhazard of following that way of life which I have mentioned, as the likliest to produce these diseases. Great wits are generally great epicures, at least, men of taste”.
While the pleasures of the edible flesh account for the diseases of the times there seems to be an underlying idea that those with a higher brain-power burn up the foods in such a different way from the unintelligent that they deserve and get more illness.
The author then turns his attention to “living in great and populous cities.” London (“where nervous distempers are most frequent, outrageous, and unnatural”) is described as being an area where “all kinds of atoms are more than sufficient to putrefy, poison, and infect the air for twenty miles round it; and which, in time, must alter, weaken, and destroy the healthiest constitution of animals of all kinds;…”.(9)
. . . . . . . . . 7
The attack on London’s inadequacies and faults continues for some time and concludes with “For, by innumerable experiments, it is certain, that the nitre or acid of fresh, new air, is as necessary towards life and health as fresh balmy food”. Other examples of the march of progress are cited in terms of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans and what happened to them when their civilizatons accommodated city organisation.
“Of the Regimen of Diet Proper for Nervous Distempers”
A mainly medicinal coverage extends from the last-discussed to chapter 5. Here we read about “diaetetick management, that part that has the greatest influence in the cure of chronical distempers,…”. Whether the use of the word coincides with our understanding of “dietetics” cannot be fully assessed. The treatment concerns “the food and physick proper and peculiar to the middle sort of each country and climate, is the best of any possible for the support of the creatures he (author of our nature) has unavoidable placed there, provided only that they follow the simplicity of nature, the dictates of reason and experience and do not lust after foreign delicacies; as we feed by the health and cheerfulness of the middling sort of almost all nations.”(10)
It would be in order to pause for a moment to reflect on the target for Cheyne’s onslaught. Hogarth’s paintings perhaps best depict the kind of society in question but the author is much more concerned with the link between food and illness as opposed to drink and pauperism.
. . . . . . . . . . 8
The English Malady; or a treatise of nervous diseases of all kinds; as spleen, vapours, lowness of spirits, hypochondriacal, and hysterical distempers, etc.
By George Cheyne
Printed for G. Strahan in Conhill and J. Leake at Bath 1784.
The following is from my manuscript of "Haggis and Other Stories - A History of Scottish Food and Hospitality". Page numbers for this extract are at the foot of each page for reference and index purposes.
© 1980 - long before the information explosion. References will follow at a later stage.
The book is held in the 6th floor collection of Edinburgh University Library and the shelf mark is EB.6168CHE. In what follows it needs to be remembered that there has been a fair amount of translation from the style of speech prevailing at the time of writing. The original work is replete with italics not to mention the use of the archaic ‘s’, almost in the form of 'f' .
The place this account has here concern a Scotsman’s view of the English sick. Although advice on proper diet has a long history in Western medicine, treatises on dietetic management, especially when combined with religious exhortation, became particularly popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
One of the most influential physicians in this connection was the Aberdonian medic and writer, George (Cheyne (1671-1743), who practised in London and Bath amongst an aristocratic and professional clientele. Cheyne, who is best known for his The English Malady recommends diet as the basic treatment of melancholy, counted amongst his friends and patients David Hume, Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, John Wesley, Alexander Pope, the Earl of Huntingdon and the Duke of Roxburgh.
Cheyne’s publications on the general benefits of diet for mental health and the beginning of his medical career.
Arriving in London at the peak of popularity for coffee-houses and taverns as professional meeting-places in the reign of Queen Anne, Cheyne fell into the company of ‘free-livers’ and ‘bottle-companions’ with the consequence that his weight rose to 448 pounds. That is 32 stone or 203 kg.
.
The glaring anomaly centres on a physician being grossly overweight advising his patient on dietary matters. However, he was sufficiently well-known to have had a London street named after him.
. . . . . . . . . 1
Having been diagnosed as a sufferer from English melancholy, Cheyne, after some experimentation, hit upon a diet of milk and vegetables combined with regular exercise, regular sleep and temperance. As a result, he enjoyed a long life of personal tranquillity and mental stability.
The book is addressed to The Right Honourable The Lord Bateman, Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath.
“The chief design of these sheets is to recommend to my fellow creatures that plain diet which is most agreeable to the purity and simplicity of uncorrupted nature, and unconquered reason”… “Prejudice, interest, appetite are powerful antagonists, which nothing but good sense, solid virtue, and true Christian courage are capable of opposing”.
Such words from the dedication serve to show the interest of this one-time Fellow of the College of Physicians at Edinburgh and Fellow of the Royal Society.
In the preface he gives reasons for the title of the work which is “a reproach universally thrown on this Island by foreigners, and all our neighbours on the continent, by whom nervous distempers, spleen, vapours, and lowness of spirits, are, in derision called the ‘English Malady’”.
.
. . . . . . . . . 2
.
.
He continues “ . . and I wish there were not so good grounds for this reflection”. The moisture of our air, the variableness of our weather,…The richness and heaviness of our food, the wealth and abundance of the inhabitants (from their universal trade, the inactivity and sedentary occupations of the better sort (among whom this evil mostly rages)…These nervous disorders being computed to make almost one third of the complaints of the people of condition in England."
We continue the preface where the author expounds his “experience and observations of many years”. The first proposition is “that the diet and manner of living of the middling rank, who are but moderate and temperate in foods of the common and natural product of the country, to which, in animal foods plainly dressed and liquors purify’s by fermentation only, without the torchures of the fire, or without being turned into spirits, is that intended by the Author of Nature for this climate and country, and consequently the most wholesome and fittest in general for prolonging life, and preventing distempers, that the end of providence and the conditions of mortality will admit”.
The second proposition is couched in similar language and instructs the wise man who is healthy not to “alter the kind and quality of his diet while his health and appetite are good”.
Proposition Three concerns the trying of proper medicines to counteract rather than change the quality of diet. The fourth proposition reduces to the idea that changes when made should be done by degrees “whether from a higher to a lower, or from a lower to a higher diet”.
In the fifth proposition, Cheyne makes the suggestion that “strong, high animal foods, and generous, spirituous liquors, as begetting warm, full, and enliven‘d juices, urging on the circulation with force, etc., are fittest for mechanical and animal strength,…”.
. . . . . . . . . .3
“Honest and faithful physicians” are required in the sixth proposition to prescribe a proper and specific diet for each distemper. In the seventh proposition, a very lengthy one, a “strict milk, seed and vegetable diet is required for a number of specific illnesses”.
Having completed his seven propositions, later in the preface he suggested that “none ever failed or died who entered on a milk, seed, and vegetable diet”. Perhaps he was living proof of his theory since he survived to the age of 72 despite his tonnage.
We will need to come back to a statement of the book‘s basic message in more detail but it might be said for the moment that the modern concern for food constituents may have begun as early 1784. We need to pass to the first statement relating to such a contention when we read “The reason why mineral and vegetable salts, poisons and causticks, have such immediate and sensible effects beyond animal salts, seems chiefly to be owing to their firmness and solidity,…”.
Modern sensibility suggests that we need take the discussion of poisons and ‘causticks’ no further. However, the reasons adduced for the different kinds of “salts” may occupy the minds of gastronomers, nutritionalists etc. . Any concern on reading about “Arsenick”, vitriol etc. maybe dissipated when we realise that the debate is far more chemical than health-food oriented.
Moving on, we are told about rich food.“…it is passed all doubt, from experiment, that rich foods, high sauces, aromaticks, delicacies, fine flavours and rich and generous wines, owe all their poignancy, high taste and gratefulness, to their abounding with such salts and sulphurs, in a much greater proportion than those other foods, that have lesser degree of such qualities;…”.
. . . . . . . . . . 4
Those of us interested in the history of health foods may be attracted by the index which highlights that the true cause of distempers (i.e., illnesses) amount to "1. luxury 2. an unactive sedentry or studious life and 3. living in great and populous cities”. We will need to move on for the detail concerning luxury. Coffee, tea, chocolate, and snuff are described as “otherwise innocent foods or amusements,…may have no effects…"
…Health and Life, however frail and brittle, are too strong forces to be taken or destroyed by such puny and insufficient pop gun artillery”!.
We should remember that the three beverages cited will have been the object of much discussion with many contemporaneous advocates for their elimination from the diet.
“The matters, as I take it stand thus: since our wealth has increased and our navigation has been extended, we have ransacked all the parts of the globe to bring together its whole stock of materials for riot, luxury, and to provoke excess. The tables of the rich and great (and indeed of all ranks who can afford it) are furnished with provisions of delicacy, number and plenty, sufficient to provoke, and even gauge the most large and voluptuous appetites.
"The whole controversy among us, seems to lie in outdoing one another in such kinds of perfusion. Prevention is rack’d to furnish the materials of our food the most delicate and savoury possible; instead of the plain simplicity of leaving the animals to range and feed in their proper eliment, with their natural nourishment, they are physick’d almost out of their lives (4), and made as great epicures and those that feed on them; and by storming, cramming, bleeding, lameing, sweating, purging and thrusting down such unnatural high-seasoned foods into them, the nervous diseases are produced in the animals themselves, even before they are admitted as food to those who complain of such disorders”. (5)
. . . . . . . . . . 5
.
We are treated to a continuation of the attack on luxury with the description of torturing and lingering ways of killing the beasts. (6) “The liquors also that are used for vehicles to such foods, of the highest most spirituous, the most scorched by the solar beams or inflam’d by repeated distillations, to carry off the present load and leave a disposition and craving in the shortest time possible”.
“Not only the materials of luxury as such as I have described: but the manner of dressing or cooking them is carried on to an exaulted height. the ingenious mixing and compounding of sauces with foreign spices and provocatives, are contrived, not only to rouze a fickly appetite to receive the unnatural load, (7) but to render a natural good one in capable of knowing when it has enough. Since French cookery has been in such repute in England, and has been improved from Spain, Italy, Turkey, and every other country that has anything remarkably delicious, high or savoury in food, since eastern pickles and sauces have been brought to embellish our continual feasts; dressings, which was designed to assist the labour of digestion, as it is now managed, not only counteracts that design, but is becoming the most difficult, curious, ingenious, and, at the same time, one of the most profitable trades”.
One area of interest rising from the last quotation concerns establishing the extent of the highly reputed French cookery in England. Most sources seem to suggest that the turn of the twentieth century saw the increased extent of high class cookery.
. . . . . . . . 6
By way of a foot-note Cheyne gives a perhaps popular saying of the time; “Do you wonder that diseases are innumerable? We should remember that the link between disease and germs was by no means established at the time of writing his book and the saying suggests that the number of people involved in the preparation of food led to the over-complication of the cookery processes.
Taking the second cause of illness “an unactive, sedentry or studious life”, we are led into the “Common observaton, that fools, weak or stupid persons, heavy and dull soles are seldom much troubled with vapours or lowness of spirits”. Then follows an explanation of “the intellectual faculty” which perhaps reduces to “The works of imagination and memory, of study, thinking, and reflecting, from what ever source the principle on which they depend springs must necessarily require bodily organs”.
“… the organs of these faculties being by warm and spoiled, must effect and deaden the whole system, and lay a foundation for the diseases of bones and weakness. Add to this that those who are likliest to excell and apply in this manner, are most capable and most inhazard of following that way of life which I have mentioned, as the likliest to produce these diseases. Great wits are generally great epicures, at least, men of taste”.
While the pleasures of the edible flesh account for the diseases of the times there seems to be an underlying idea that those with a higher brain-power burn up the foods in such a different way from the unintelligent that they deserve and get more illness.
The author then turns his attention to “living in great and populous cities.” London (“where nervous distempers are most frequent, outrageous, and unnatural”) is described as being an area where “all kinds of atoms are more than sufficient to putrefy, poison, and infect the air for twenty miles round it; and which, in time, must alter, weaken, and destroy the healthiest constitution of animals of all kinds;…”.(9)
. . . . . . . . . 7
The attack on London’s inadequacies and faults continues for some time and concludes with “For, by innumerable experiments, it is certain, that the nitre or acid of fresh, new air, is as necessary towards life and health as fresh balmy food”. Other examples of the march of progress are cited in terms of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans and what happened to them when their civilizatons accommodated city organisation.
“Of the Regimen of Diet Proper for Nervous Distempers”
A mainly medicinal coverage extends from the last-discussed to chapter 5. Here we read about “diaetetick management, that part that has the greatest influence in the cure of chronical distempers,…”. Whether the use of the word coincides with our understanding of “dietetics” cannot be fully assessed. The treatment concerns “the food and physick proper and peculiar to the middle sort of each country and climate, is the best of any possible for the support of the creatures he (author of our nature) has unavoidable placed there, provided only that they follow the simplicity of nature, the dictates of reason and experience and do not lust after foreign delicacies; as we feed by the health and cheerfulness of the middling sort of almost all nations.”(10)
It would be in order to pause for a moment to reflect on the target for Cheyne’s onslaught. Hogarth’s paintings perhaps best depict the kind of society in question but the author is much more concerned with the link between food and illness as opposed to drink and pauperism.
. . . . . . . . . . 8
.
“I have given the preference, in my ‘essay on the gout’ to the common diet of world chosen flesh meat, and good middling ripe wine, even in that obstinate and painful distemper, commonly treated by a milk diet”.
“One great advantage that a milk and vegetable diet has over a flesh or animal one, lies principally in this, that one may thereby avoid the loading reduced with too many salts of any kind, or thickening with more gross and hard earthy particles, or such as cannot be broken or comminuted by the natural force of the weeks solids: …”. …
….“Another advantage is, that it eventually dilutes and cools too thick or hot juices and that sufficient quantity of it maybe taken to keep the bowels and blood vessels full, and sufficiently turgid,…”. “
Modern nutritionists may have cause to argue with such a view but it is interesting to ascertain the level of informed opinion in the later part of the 18th century.
“The sum of the whole, in my opinion, is this; our distempers generally arise from oil, salts, and spirits, carry’d into the habit by our food; nothing else but these in the nature of things, having force enough to produce them. When the juices are too viscide or crimonious, or the obstructions many and great, diet offers us one of the surest means to cure these ill-qualities. All salts, in their general nature, are of the same kind, hard and highly attractive, and differ only as they are smaller or greater in their parts, and according to the earths, oils, and other mixtures that unite them or mix with them.
"Milk and vegetables have but little saline matter in proportion to their bulk, and therefore a total milk and vegetable diet, may in some cases defraud the constitution of that due proportion of salts necessary for the mentioned purposes, and for want of which the solids may become too lax and feeble: but on the other hand too great quantity of flesh meat, and hot flamented liquors, or that which is of too saline or spirituous a nature will load the habit with too many of these salts and oils, and so beget the mentioned distempers”.
.. . . . . . . . 9
Over some 36 pages, we are given various treatments which culminate in the recommendation for horseradish tea or any bitter or acrid plant to induce vomiting. “I know not in nature a more universal and effectual remedy for most if not all the symptoms of these disorders when they rise to any high degree, than gentle vomits suited to the strength and constitution of the patient,…” (The reader is spared the detail!)
The remaining pages describe the application of various diets in general and specific cases the last of which is “The case of the author”.
We need to distil from the description (12) (often hypochondriacally writen) that the author was corpulent even before going to London: “upon my coming to London, I all of a sudden changed my whole manner of living; I found the bussle, companions, the younger gentry and free-livers, to be the most easy of access, and most quickly susceptible of friendship and aquaintance, nothing being necessary for that purpose but to be able to east lustily, and swallow down much liquor;…” ...
... Whereupon he grew daily in bulk.
On contracting an “autumnal intermittent fever” he cured it with cinnamon. We will need to look elsewhere to ascertain the extent of such practices but his description may be regarded as being somewhat typical of Cheyne’s treatment of various “distempers”.
He fell under other illnesses and retired to the country “into a fine air, and liv’d very low: I had a seton made in my neck, which I carry’d about for many months;…”. At least it may be said that he practised what he preached, but the reader must be spared the detail. He talks about “being blooded” after an accident involving horses and “the wheels of the chariot having entirely shaved my eyebrow”.(13) Needless to say, there is plenty of detail in his description of his own treatment by diet.
An assessment of Cheyne’s standing within the medical community of Edinburgh may only be guessed. Perhaps just as difficult to appraise with the present access to contemporary medical literature is whether his views were held to be crankish.
What has been established is that there was some concern for diet even if expressed within the Scottish pejorative view of English attitudes and activities.
.
. . . . . . . . . 10
Index
cooking "to an exaulted height" c 1725 - p6
diet - more chemical than health-food orientated c 1725 - p4
diet - strict milk, seed and veg for specific illnesses - p4
diet as basic treatment of melancholy - c 1725 - p1
Diet, a Regimen of Diet Proper for .. Distempers c 1725 - p8
diet, vegetarian - advantage - c 1725 - p9
English Malady - nervous distempers, spleen, vapours - p1
English Malady - one third of English complaints c 1725 - p3
English melancholy c 1725 - p2
epicures - great wits or men of taste - Cheyne c 1725 - p7
horseradish tea to induce vomiting - c 1725 - p10
Malady, English - nervous distempers, spleen, vapours - p1
vegetarian diet - advantage - c 1725 - p9
diet - more chemical than health-food orientated c 1725 - p4
diet - strict milk, seed and veg for specific illnesses - p4
diet as basic treatment of melancholy - c 1725 - p1
Diet, a Regimen of Diet Proper for .. Distempers c 1725 - p8
diet, vegetarian - advantage - c 1725 - p9
English Malady - nervous distempers, spleen, vapours - p1
English Malady - one third of English complaints c 1725 - p3
English melancholy c 1725 - p2
epicures - great wits or men of taste - Cheyne c 1725 - p7
horseradish tea to induce vomiting - c 1725 - p10
Malady, English - nervous distempers, spleen, vapours - p1
vegetarian diet - advantage - c 1725 - p9