Chapter XIII: Pressavin. 1750

An eminent Surgeon of Lyon, in the Medical and Surgical College of which city he held a professorship, and where he collected an extensive Anatomical Museum. At the Revolution of 1789 he embraced its principles with ardour, and filled the posts of Municipal Officer and of Procureur de la Commune. On the day of the Lyon executions, under the direction of the revolutionary tribunals, Sept. 9, 1792, Pressavin intervened, and attempted to save several of the condemned. In the Convention Nationale, to which he had been elected deputy, he voted for the execution of the King; in other respects he was opposed to the extreme measures of the violent revolutionists, and in Sept., 1793, he was expelled from the Society of the Jacobins. In 1798 he was named Member of the Council of Five Hundred, for two years, by the department of the Rhone. The date of his death seems to be uncertain.

His chief writings are:--

_Traité des Maladies des Nerfs_, 1769. _Traité des Maladies Vénériennes, où l’on indique un Nouveau Remède_, 8vo., 1773. Last, and most important, _L’Art de Prolonger la Vie et de Conserver la Santé_, 8vo. Paris, 1786. It was translated into Spanish, Madrid, 8vo., 1799.

Pressavin thus expresses his convictions as to the fatal effects of Kreophagy:--

“We cannot doubt that, if Man had always limited himself to the use
of the nourishment destined for his organs, he would not be seen,
to-day, to have become the victim of this multitude of maladies
which, by a premature death, mows down (moissonne) the greatest
number of individuals, before Age or Nature has put bounds to the
career of his life. Other Animals, on the contrary, almost all
arrive at that term without having experienced any infirmity. I
speak of those who live free in the fields; for those whom we
have subjected to our needs (real or pretended), and whom we call
_domestic_, share in the penalty of our abuses, experience nearly
the same alteration in their temperament, and become subject to an
infinity of maladies from which Wild Animals are exempt.

“Men, then, coming from the hands of Nature, lived a long
time without thinking of immolating living beings to gratify
(s’assouvir) their appetite. They are, without doubt, those happy
times which our ancient poets have represented to us under the
agreeable allegory of the _Golden Age_. In fact Man, _by natural
organisation_ mild, nourishing himself only on vegetable-foods,
must have been originally of pacific disposition, quite fitted
(bien propre) to maintain among his fellows that happy Peace which
makes the delights of Society. Ferocity, I repeat it, is peculiar
to carnivorous animals; the blood which they imbibe maintains that
character in them....

“But if this faculty (reflection), which is called Reason, has
furnished Man with so great resources for extending his enjoyments
and increasing his well-being, how many evils have not the
multiplied abuses, which he has made of them, drawn upon him? That
which regards his Food is not the one of them which has _least_
contributed to his degradation, as well physical as moral....

“Among other evidences of this, country-people, who subsist upon
the non-flesh diet, are exempt from the multitude of maladies which
engender corruption of the juices of the blood, such as _humoral_,
putrid, and malign fevers, from Apoplexy, from _Cachexy_, from
Gout, and from an infinity of miserable disorders--their offspring;
they arrive at a very advanced Age, free from the infirmities which
early affect our old _Sybarites_. On the contrary, the inhabitants
of towns, who make flesh their principal food, pass their lives
miserably, a prey to all these maladies which one may regard, for
that reason, endemic among them.

“Another very evident proof that Flesh is not a food natural to man
is that, whoever has abstained, during a certain time, when he goes
back to it--it is rare that this new regimen does not soon become
in him the germ of a disease, the graver in proportion to the
abstinence from that food. We have opportunities of observing this
after the Fasts of the Catholics--in the majority of those who have
faithfully practised abstinence from flesh.”

He admits that there may be some constitutions, whose organs of digestion have been so corrupted by the long use of flesh, that a _sudden_ change may be unadvisable; but a gradual reform cannot but be always beneficial:--

“I do not doubt that Apoplexy, that fatal Malady so common among
the rich people of the towns, might be escaped by those who are
threatened with it, by entire abstinence from flesh. A Sanguine
or humoral _plethora_ is always the predisposing cause of this
disease. A sudden rarefaction of the blood or of the humours in the
vessels is the proximate cause of it; this rarefaction takes place
only by the predisposition of the juices of the body to corruption.”

Pressavin devotes a considerable proportion of his Treatise to the arguments from Comparative Physiology.--While firmly persuaded both of the unnaturalness, and of the fatal mischiefs, of the diet of blood,[311] he expresses his despair of an early triumph of Reason and Humanity by means of a general dietetic reformation.[312]