Chapter XXXIX: Newton. 1770-1825

John Frank Newton, the friend and associate of Dr. Lambe, Shelley, and the little band who met at the house of the former to share his vegetarian repasts, appears to have been one of the earliest converts of Dr. Lambe, to whom he dedicated his _Return to Nature_, in gratitude for the recovery of his health through the adoption of the reformed regimen.

He published his little work, as he informs us in his preface, to impart to others the benefits which he himself had experienced; and especially to make known to the heads of households the fact that his whole family of himself, wife, and four children under nine years of age, with their nurse, had been living, at the date of his publication, for two years upon a non-flesh diet, during which time the apothecary’s bill, he tells us, had amounted to the sum of sixpence; and that charge had been incurred by himself.

The ever-memorable meetings of the reformers at the house of Newton, where Shelley was a constant guest, have been thus recorded by one of the biographers of the great poet:--“Shelley was intimate with the Newton family, and was converted by them in 1813, and he began then a strict vegetable diet. His intimate association with the amiable and accomplished votaries of a _Return to Nature_ was perhaps the most pleasing portion of his poetical, philosophical, and lovely life.... For some years I was in the thick of it; for I lived much with a select and most estimable society of persons (the Newtons), who had ‘returned to Nature,’ and I heard much discussion on the topic of vegetable diet. Certainly their vegetable dinners were delightful, elegant, and excellent repasts; flesh, fowl, fish, and ‘game’ never appeared--nor eggs nor butter _bodily_, but the two latter were admitted into cookery, but as sparingly as possible, and under protest, as not approved of and soon to be dispensed with. We had soups in great variety, that seemed the more delicate from the absence of flesh-meat.

“There were vegetables of every kind, plainly stewed or scientifically disguised. Puddings, tarts, confections and sweets abounded. Cheese was excluded. Milk and cream might not be taken unreservedly, but they were allowed in puddings, and sparingly in tea. Fruits of every kind were welcomed. We luxuriated in tea and coffee, and sought variety occasionally in cocoa and chocolate. Bread and butter, and buttered toast were eschewed; but bread, cakes, and plain seed-cakes were liberally divided among the faithful.”[222]

The cause of the publication of his book Newton thus states:--

“Having for many years been an habitual invalid, and having at
length found that relief from regimen which I had long and vainly
hoped for from drugs, I am anxious, from sympathy with those
afflicted, to impart to others the knowledge of the benefit I have
experienced, and to dispel, as far as in me lies, the prejudices
under which I conceive mankind to labour on points so nearly
connected with their health and happiness.

“The particulars of my case I have already related at the
concluding pages of Dr. Lambe’s _Reports on Cancer_. To the account
there given I have little to add, but that, by continuing to
confine myself to the regimen advised in that work, I continue to
experience the same benefit; that the winter which has just elapsed
has been passed much more comfortably than that which preceded it,
and that, if my habitual disorder is not completely eradicated, it
is so much subdued as to give but little inconvenience; that I have
suffered but a single day’s confinement for several months; and,
upon the whole, that I enjoy an existence which many might envy who
consider themselves to be in full possession of the blessings of
health.

“All that I have to regret in my present undertaking is the
imperfect way in which it is executed. The adepts in medicine
have gained their knowledge originally from the experience of the
sick. I have taken my own sensations for my guide, and am myself
alone responsible for the conclusions which I have drawn from
them, the manuscript of this volume having been neither corrected
nor looked over by any individual. While I make no pretensions to
medical science, I cannot consent to be reasoned or ridiculed out
of my feelings; nor to believe that to be an illusion, the truth
of which has been confirmed to me by long-continued and repeated
observation.”

The use of distilled water was a cardinal article in the dietary creed of his friend Dr. Lambe, and upon this point Newton particularly insists. He appeals with much fervour, as we have just stated, to parents to have recourse to the natural means of prevention and cure, in place of vainly trying every available _artificial_ method by medicine and drugs. He instances, with minute particularity, the regimen of his children, whom he asserts to have been, up to the moment of his writing, perfectly free from any sort of malady or disorder, and to be--

“So remarkably healthy that several medical men who have seen
and examined them with a scrutinizing eye, all agreed in the
observation that they knew nowhere a whole family which equals
them in robustness. Should the success of this experiment, now of
three years’ standing, proceed as it has begun, there is little
doubt, [he ventures to flatter himself] that it must at length
have some influence with the public, and that every parent who
finds the illness of his family both afflicting and expensive, will
say to himself ‘Why should I any longer be imprudent or foolish
enough to have my children sick?’ All hail to the resolution which
that sentiment implies! But until it becomes general, I feel it
necessary to exhort, in the warmest language I can think of, those
who have the young in their charge to institute an experiment
which I have made before them with the completest success. To
those parents especially do I address myself who, aware that
temperance in enjoyment is the best warrant of its duration, feel
how dangerous and how empty are all the feverous amusements of
our assemblies, our dinners, and our theatres, compared with the
genuine and tranquil pleasures of a happy circle at home.”

He presents an alluring picture of the health-producing results for the young of the natural regimen. He promises that

“They will become not only more robust but more beautiful;
that their carriage will be erect, their step firm; that their
development at a critical period of youth, the prematurity of which
has been considered an evil, will be retarded; that, above all,
the danger of being deprived of them will in every way diminish;
while by these light repasts their hilarity will be augmented, and
their intellects cleared in a degree which shall astonishingly
illustrate the delightful effects of this regimen.... I will
beg here to attempt an answer in this place to that trite and
specious objection to Dr. Lambe’s opinions that ‘what is suitable
to one constitution may be not so to another.’ If there be a
single person existing, whose health would not be improved by the
vegetable diet and distilled water, then the whole system falls
at once to the ground. The question is simply, whether fruits and
other vegetables be not the natural sustenance of man, who would
have occasion for no other drink than these afford, and whose
thirst is at present excited by an unnatural flesh diet, which
causes his disorders bodily and mentally.... Another objection
sometimes urged is this: ‘If children, brought up on a vegetable
regimen, should at a future period of their lives adopt a flesh
diet, they will certainly suffer more from the change than they
otherwise would have done.’ The very contrary of this, I conceive,
would happen. The stomach is so fortified by the general increase
of health, that a person thus nourished is enabled to bear what
one whose humours are less impaired would sink under. The children
of our family can each of them eat a dozen or eighteen walnuts for
supper without the most trifling indigestion, an experiment which
those who feed their children in the usual manner would consider
it adventurous to attempt. So also the Irish porters in London
bear these alterations of diet successfully, and owe much of their
actual vigour to the vegetable food of their forefathers, and
to their own, before they emigrated from Ireland, where, in all
probability, they did not taste flesh half-a dozen times in the
year.”

As to another well-known pretext, that the propensity to flesh-eating, and the relish with which it is evidently enjoyed by the majority of flesh eaters, is proof of its fitness, Newton justly objects the various unnatural and disgusting foods of many savage peoples which are eaten with equal relish, so that “the argument of the agreeable flavour proves nothing, I apprehend, by proving too much.” He exhorts the medical faculty generally, and those members of it who are in charge of hospitals, infirmaries, or workhouses, to try the effect of the pure regimen on the sufferers and patients--in particular, in the cases of the victims of cancer. Amongst others of his personal acquaintance who had derived the greatest benefit from the regimen, he instances Dr. Adam Ferguson, the historian of the Roman Republic, who lived strictly on a vegetable diet. He was in the habit of accompanying Mr. Newton, in the year 1794, in rides through the environs of Rome. He was still living in 1811, and he died, in fact, at the age of ninety, holding a professorship in the University of Edinburgh.