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William Metcalfe adopted a meat-free diet in 1810
At the heart of the Bible Christian Church were three guiding principles: temperance, pacifi sm, and a meatless diet.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Cowherd’s church grew, primarily drawing members of Manchester’s working class with the promise of salvation for their souls and free vegetable soup for their stomachs. The church’s activities attracted the attention of William Metcalfe, a fellow former Swedenborgian. Metcalfe had already adopted a meat-free diet in 1810, viewing it as the most natural of human states. Many of Metcalfe’s friends and colleagues disagreed, urging him to give up what they referred to as his “foolish notions of a vegetable diet,” fearing for his strength and general well-being. To the contrary, Metcalfe pointed out; the eff ects of a meatfree diet had quickly led to an increase in weight and strength. Things were looking up considerably. With his health intact, Metcalfe even married; something he felt was highly unlikely just a few years earlier.
We learn the value of fat flesh again when Native Americans court a beautiful white woman, the first they had ever seen, in the Columbia River area during the fur trade 200 years ago by offering "she would always have an abundance of fat salmon, anchovies, and elk"
Donald McTavish -taking no chances! - brought her with him every time he came ashore; and her flamboyant arrival at the fort was always an event. The voyageurs stopped work, the Indians swarmed in, and Henry himself made a holiday of her visits. "In the jolly-boat came Mr. McT. the doctor, and Jane," he wrote on one occasion. "I opened a cask of bottled porter, and also a cask of rather mouldy biscuits. Many Chinooks and Clatsops came in, some to trade, and others to visit." And, of course, to gawk at Jane.
The Chinook and Clatsop bucks became madly infatuated with her. King Comcomly's son, according to Ross, offered a hundred rare sea otters for her hand. Not only that. "He would never ask her to carry wood, draw water, dig for roots, or hunt for provisions . . .he would make her mistress over his other wives, and permit her to sit her ease from morning to night . . . she would always have an abundance of fat salmon, anchovies, and elk, and be allowed to smoke as many pipes of tobacco during the day as she thought proper." But, although Jane's morals may have been strictly of the Chinook variety, her tastes were her own. She looked down her nose at these and many other tempting offers. Then Com- comly's son changed his tack: he formed a plan with his friends to carry her off while she was taking her customary evening stroll along the beach. He also declared that he would never again come near the fort while she was there - which, we may assume, was quite all right with Jane. Her effect on the voyageurs and young gentlemen of Fort George was, of course, no less devastating; and Henry be- gan to discuss measures for her "protection" with McTavish.
Dr John Latham publishes a book of Rollo's case studies - spreading the information about the pure animal matter diet. "his observations on the absolute necessity of a pure animal diet will stand the test of experience"
https://dlcs.io/pdf/wellcome/pdf-item/b2106331x/0
In Two Cases of the Diabetes Mellitus, Rollo and Cruickshank described the treatment of two patients suوٴering from glycosuria, polyuria and polydipsia with a combination of organic and inorganic salts and a diet restricted in vegetable food, and made largely of meat and fat [1]. Нis was based on the observation that, while both animal foods and vegetable foods are nutritious and will support life, glucose, found in the urine of patients with diabetes and therefore obviously connected to the disease, can be found in large quantities in vegetable foods but only in trace amounts in meat and fat. Нe diet was eوٴective for one of Rollo’s patients, but not the other. Redfearn subsequently published a report of the successful application of Rollo’s method in his own patient [2] and Rollo’s supporter John Latham published many case studies of the diet in his 1811 book Facts and Opinions Concerning Diabetes [3]. Rollo’s method seems to have become widely disseminated; circa 1830 the American adventurer Josiah Harlan, who had taught himself medicine from a popular encyclopaedia, prescribed an animal matter diet to a client in the Punjab, with what results we do not know, according to Ben MacIntyre’s life of Harlan, Нe Man Who Would be King [4]. Нe inconsistent response to the diet seen in Rollo’s first two cases, and in the cases of Latham, can be explained by its high protein content. In the later researches of Woodyatt and others, protein has a glucose value of 58%, due to a high proportion of gluconeogenic amino acids. Hadden gives an analysis of Rollo’s diet for patient 1, Captain Meredith, as supplying 160 g carbohydrate, 136 g protein and 135 g fat [1]. Нus only 50% of the energy from this diet is in the form of the nutrient, fat, which has the lowest requirement for insulin; nor is the diet as low in carbohydrate (from bread and milk, and later, when Captain Meredith returned to Ireland, potatoes) or as permissive with regard to non-starchy vegetables as modern thought would recommend. Captain Meredith lived another 15 years aіer adopting Rollo’s diet, dying in Newfoundland at the age of 49 - according to Hadden, death was probably due to macrovascular complications
Page 90:
"I have now brought the history of Diabetes down to that period when Dr. Rollo first published his celebrated Treatise, a work which ought to be in the hands of every practictioner who is anxious for the fullest information upon the subject.: a work which, like the discovery of sugar in Diabetic Urine, equally marks an important area in this disease: a work which teaches us to cure what Willis taught us only to know, and which will convey his name, with that of his learned predecessor, down with honor to the latest posterity. And let not any thing which may occur in the following pages be construed to detract from that honorable distinction to which he is so justifly entitled; for his observations on the absolute necessity of a pure animal diet will stand the test of experience, when speculations, with respect to medicine in this disease, by every physician who has hitherto existed, (and even those by Dr. Rollo himself) may probably be altogether neglected and forgotten: I must refer the reader to the work itself, which in its more enlarged form is, if possible, rendered much more important by the many communications therein made from a great number of very ingenious correspondents."
Page 100
"so that not only may it exist where little of vegetable nutriment has been taken, and consequently where but little sugar can be produced, but where animal matter has alone been eaten:"
Full Text:
https://archive.org/stream/factsopinionscon00lath/factsopinionscon00lath_djvu.txt
Read or search the full thing - contribute extra interesting comments.
Selkirk's domain embraced the fertile valley of the Red River of the North, which, because great herds of buffalo wintered there, was the source of the pemmican that was the trappers' most portable food.
Open conflict began when a colonizing project, which had interested the Hudson's Bay Company for some years, was given into the hands of Lord Selkirk in 1811. Selkirk had bought heavily of the company's stock to further his aim of establishing an agricultural settlement near Lake Winnipeg for poverty-stricken Scots and Irishmen. The company's interest in the founding of such a colony was that it might furnish farm produce and also provide a place where retired employees might live. Selkirk took title to 110,000 square miles of land covering large parts of present Manitoba, Minnesota, and North Dakota, and thereby invaded a country the Nor Westers considered their own. Selkirk's domain embraced the fertile valley of the Red River of the North, which, because great herds of buffalo wintered there, was the source of the pemmican that was the trappers' most portable food.
When the Nor Westers gathered for their annual meeting at Fort William in 1814 (while Britain and the United States were still fighting the War of 1812) their hostility was high. The angry traders were convinced that selkirk's settlement would bring ruin to the fur trade. It seemed clear that any agricultural settlement would cause the beaver in the area to abandon their streams and would also drive away the buffalo.
After its first hesitant beginnings the Red River Settlement began to assert itself. Selkirk's men seized supplies of pemmican, sought to control buffalo hunting, and ordered the Nor'Westers to remove their trading posts or have them razed to the foundations. The North West Company reacted by taking the governor prisoner, driving out most of the settlers, and burning their houses.
Joseph Brotherton replaces the late Cowherd as minister and preaches the values of vegetarianism. His wife publishes the first cookcook called Vegetable Cookery dedicated to ovo-lacto vegetarian meals, although they had copious amounts of butter.
Spreading vegetarianism
What the rift did was formalise Cowherd's views on vegetarianism – to be part of his new church, the congregation were expected to abstain from meat – and plant the seed of a movement that would stretch across the UK and beyond.
Joseph Brotherton, a lay member of the original Christ Church, had been a strong supporter of Cowherd from the start, and took on his cause with gusto. After Cowherd's death, in 1816, it was Brotherton who became the minister at the church and later, after the reform act was passed in 1832, he became Salford's first MP – all the time preaching the values of egalitarianism and vegetarianism.
Brotherton's wife was also influential in spreading the 'no meat' gospel, when in 1812, she published the first cook book devoted to vegetarian meals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_Cookery
Vegetable Cookery: With an Introduction, Recommending Abstinence from Animal Food and Intoxicating Liquors is the first vegetarian cookbook, authored anonymously by Martha Brotherton (1783–1861) of Salford. It was first published as A New System of Vegetable Cookery in periodical form in 1812.[2] A second book edition appeared in 1821 and a third was published by Horatio Phillips of London in 1829 under its most well known title Vegetable Cookery.[2]
The first edition was published anonymously by a "member of the Bible Christian Church".[2] The fourth edition published in 1833 by Effingham Wilson, contained 1,261 recipes and was also published anonymously "by a lady".[2] Martha's husband Joseph Brotherton wrote the introduction for the book. Two further editions appeared in 1839 and 1852.[2] The 1852 edition contains a foreword by James Simpson, the first President of the Vegetarian Society.[3]
It was the first published vegetarian cookbook.[2][4] Martha and Joseph Brotherton were leading members of William Cowherd's Bible Christian Church.[4][5]
The recipes are ovo-lacto vegetarian. Many of the recipes involve copious amounts of butter. Historians have noted that "Brotherton's book served as a guide for Americans who began to self-identify as vegetarian in the early decades of the nineteenth century."[6] Kathryn Gleadle has written that the book "was enormously important to the movement, forming the basis of most subsequent works on vegetable cookery."[7]
"Man is by his frame as well as his appetite a carnivorous animal" - Encyclopaedia Perthensis
Carnivorous - Flesh-eating; that of which flesh is the proper food.--In birds there is no mastication or comminution of the meat in the mouth; but in such as are not carnivorous, it is immediately swallowed into the crop or crow. Ray on the Creation.
--Man is by his frame, as well as his appetite, a carnivorous animal. Arbutimos on Aliments.
Carnivorous is an epithet applied to those animals, which naturally seek and feed on flesh. It has been a dispute among naturalists, whether man is naturally carnivorous. Those who take the negative side, intuit chiefly on the structure of our deeth, which are mostly incisors or molars; not such as carnivorous animlas are furnished with, and w ihch are proper to tear flesh in pieces; to which it may be added, that, even when we do feed on flesh, it is not withtout a preparatory alteration by boiling, roasting, etc, and even then that it is the hadrdes of digestion of all foods. To these arguments Dr Wallis subjoins another, which is that all quadrupeds which feed on herbs or plants have a long colon, with a caecum at the upper end of it, or somewhot equivalent, which conveys the food by a long and large progress, from the stomach downwards, in order to its propre passage through the intestines. Now, in man, the caecum is very visible; a strong presumption that he was not intended for a carnivorous animal. It is true, the caecum is small in adults, and seems of little use; but in a featus it is much larger in proportion; And it is probable, our customary change change of diet, as we grow up, may occasion this thinking.
But to these arguments, Dr Tyfon repiles, that if man had been designed not to be carnivorous, there would doubtless have been found, somewhere on the globe, people who do not feed on flesh; which is not the case. Neither are carnivorous animals always without a colon and caecum; nor are all animals carnivorous which have those parts; the oppossum, for instance, hath both a colon and caecum, and yet feeds on poultry and other flesh; whereas the hedge-hog, which has neither colon nor caecum, and so ought to be carnivorous, feeds only on vegetables. Add to this, that hogs, which have both, will feed upon flesh when they can get it; and rats and mice, which have large ceacums, will feed on bacon as well as bread and cheese. Lastly, the human race are furnished with teeth necessary for the preparation of all kinds of foods; whence it would seem, that we are intended to live on all. And as the alimentary duct in the human body is fitted for digesting all kinds of food, ought we not rather to conclude, that nature did not intend to deny us any?
It is no lesson disputed whether mankind were carnivorous before the flood. St Jerom, Chryfoltom, Theodoret, and other ancients, maintain, that all animal food was then forbidden; which opinion is also strenuously supported among the moderns by Curcellzeus, and refuted by Heidegger, Dauzius, Bockhart, etc. See Antediluvians.
Rev Metcalfe brings 40 Englishmen to Philadelphia with vegetarian ideals tied to their faith
From The Development of the Movement by The Vegetarian Society UK:
Two followers of the Reverend Cowherd, the Reverend William Metcalfe and the Reverend James Clark, set sail for the United States with thirty-nine other members of the Bible Christian Church in 1817. Some of them remained vegetarian and provided a nucleus for the American vegetarian movement.
The current and increasingly publicized debate over the vegetarianism of Jesus Christ, brought to the mainstream largely by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has a history in the United States. In 18th-century America various Christian sects practiced ascetism that included the "self-denial" of vegetarianism. However, it wasn't until the 19th century (as far as this historian has thus far been able to discern) that vegetarians took their contention about Jesus and vegetarianism public. It began in 1817, when Reverend William Metcalfe of England brought a small group of Bible-Christians, members of a church established a decade before by the Swedenborgian Reverend William Cowherd, to Pennsylvania.
Once settled in America, Metcalfe and his wife, Susanne, tried to teach their neighbors in Philadelphia about pacifism, temperance, abolitionism and vegetarianism--major tenets of their religion. His church did not enjoy widespread success, but what it lacked in size it gained in loyalty.
Metcalfe's little group of loyal vegetarians and their leader not only abstained from meat, they believed that Jesus had been a vegetarian. On account of teaching such a belief, Reverend Metcalfe, a congenial, pious and well-liked man, was unable to build a large congregation and sometimes suffered the slings of opposition to vegetarianism. Metcalfe's wisdom as a preacher and a person was attacked in the newspapers, and he was called "Infidel."
As a result, Metcalfe constantly had to struggle to keep the church financially stable. When he wasn't preaching, he was busy teaching in the church's tiny school, or writing and publishing two newspapers that reported on issues such as slavery, temperance and, it can be assumed, vegetarianism. Metcalfe's legacy of vegetarianism doesn't end at the church gate, for he was a force that brought together two other determined and courageous vegetarians. Those two individuals were Sylvester Graham and William Alcott, M.D. Together, Metcalfe and the two renowned vegetarian advocates formed the first national vegetarian organization in America.
Reverends William Metcalfe and James Clarke lead forty-one members of the new Bible Christian Church to Philadelphia aboard the Liverpool Packet.
It was the early morning of March 29, 1817. A cool breeze waft ed through the foggy Liverpool air along with an overriding sense of excitement, anxiety, and anticipation. The Reverends William Metcalfe and James Clarke gazed out on their gathered flock, surveying the situation before them. Inspired by the providential timing—it was, aft er all, near the time of the year when the ancient Israelites made their exodus from Egypt—forty-one followers of the fledgling Bible Christian Church boarded the majestic Liverpool Packet . 1 For months church members had discussed rumors of religious freedom and abundant providence in the new American republic. With a radical religious and political spirit that had led to isolation and intimidation in England, Bible Christians saw the nascent American experiment as fertile ground where their independent lifestyle could flourish. The fear of political persecution combined with a burgeoning industrial society pushed Bible Christians westward to Philadelphia.
The Bible Christians’ decision to leave England for the United States would eventually have larger social and cultural implications than the group could have imagined. The activities of this small band of dissidents would lead to the development of a much larger movement in the United States, focusing on one particular component of the church’s doctrine, the abstention from meat. Proto-vegetarianism—the individuals and groups who would lay the foundations of a vegetarian movement in the United States— began with the arrival of the Bible Christians.
The group was the first to adopt meatless dietetics at the center of its members’ lives while also advocating for this lifestyle in American society at large. The Bible Christians, however, were not the only group to introduce the principle of meat abstention to Americans in the early years of the republic. Within years of the group’s establishment in Philadelphia, another movement, known popularly as Grahamism, inspired larger groups of interested reformers to abandon their carnivorous practices.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, multiple groups and individuals experimented with meatless diets, driven by a desire to create moral, social, and political reform. Proto-vegetarian movements in the United States were marked by outreach to meat-eaters through speeches, publications, newspapers, and public meetings that sought to illustrate the larger social and political implications of dietary choices. These early developments set the stage for a larger movement to mature outside of Philadelphia and eventually gave rise to American vegetarianism. The Bible Christians migrating to Philadelphia did so with the full support of the movement’s founder, William Cowherd, who preached that it was only possible to live an authentic religious life in an agricultural society.
The Bible Christians start a day school and teach that "a meatless lifestyle was the true heavenly inspired diet, present in the garden of Eden and promised during the messianic era."
In 1811, Metcalfe was ordained as a Bible Christian minister. Soon aft er he began looking toward the United States as a new potential home where the group could grow. An increasingly oppressive political environment in England at the end of the Napoleonic Wars led to organized attempts to quell radical reformers. Bible Christians—sympathetic to the Luddite spirit of the times—were, in the words of one church member, “obnoxious not only to the hired minions of power, but also to our relatives.” The notion of emigrating enjoyed significant support among church members, who frequently discussed the opportunities for civil and religious freedom in the United States. What better place than America, Metcalfe argued, to present a nascent, radical religion? Under the guidance of Metcalfe and Clarke, the Bible Christian immigrants arrived on the shores of the United States on June 14, 1817. The group had survived a difficult seventy-nine-day voyage at sea, presumably made even more objectionable by the liberal consumption of meat and alcohol by the ship’s crew, non–Bible Christian passengers, and even by a few renegade church members.
Yet the group arrived in Philadelphia well-funded and determined to “stand still and do good” with faith in the notion that “verily thou shalt be fed.” 9 Immediately, however, the group split along ideological lines. Clarke and his followers viewed agriculture as the key to the growth of the church. Metcalfe—cosmopolitan and decidedly more modernist—saw the city as the location with the greatest potential for expansion. In August 1817, Clarke and his family settled in Elkland Township, Pennsylvania, establishing a small church and Sunday school based on the principles of akreophagy, the habitual abstention from meat-eating. However, the agricultural life would not lead to the growth of the Bible Christians as Clarke and Cowherd had planned. In 1823 Clarke and his family—having lost the few followers they had accrued—resettled in Shelby County, Indiana, living out their days tilling their farm, disconnected from the Philadelphia Bible Christians. 10 The path of William Metcalfe and his followers diff ered signifi cantly from that of the Clarke family. Philadelphia originally attracted the group because of its available land and passable roads connecting the church to the rest of the city. 11 Philadelphia was the country’s second most populous city, and the Bible Christians saw it as an ideal location to gain converts amid a growing urban reform spirit. 12 In Philadelphia, popular fears of perceived new dangers including prostitution, pornographic writers, and other corrupting infl uences led older citizens to attempt to guide the younger generation toward moral piety. Through reform institutions, pamphlets, and novels these reformers sought to quell youthful intemperance. 13 Bible Christians’ attempts at converting individuals to a meatless diet fi t seamlessly within the larger reform milieu that took hold in Philadelphia during the early nineteenth Proto-vegetarianism :: 13 century. Individuals free of the overly invigorating infl uence of meat, Bible Christians believed, were more apt to make morally sound decisions.
In July 1817, the Bible Christians established a day school and informal worship space, inviting Philadelphia’s churchgoing public to join. Metcalfe’s entreaties were based on the desire to “not form a sectarian church, deriving their doctrines from human creeds.” Instead, the Bible Christians promised to “become more efficiently edified in Bible Truths” and “the literal expressions of Sacred Scripture.” A meatless lifestyle, the Bible Christians believed, was the true heavenly inspired diet, present in the garden of Eden and promised during the messianic era. At the heart of the Bible Christian ideology was the notion that biblical truths were to be revealed to humanity progressively over time. Only through dedicated study of the Bible’s tenants could individuals truly understand divine providence. Under Metcalfe’s guidance, the group preached that Jesus himself was a vegetarian and that any stories of his eating meat were misinterpretations.
The group rented a back room in a schoolhouse at 10 North Front Street, providing daily schooling along with Sabbath morning services that featured intensive text study. The church’s space quickly became too expensive, however, particularly aft er a handful of founding members perished during a yellow fever epidemic in the fall of 1818. With dwindling membership and an unpopular philosophy of meat and alcohol abstention, Metcalfe sought to reinvent the Bible Christian Church while holding on to its core principles of pacifism and meatless dietetics
Lord Byron's poem Don Juan was published in 1819 and featured a story of a shipwrecked crew drawing lots and cannibalizing the unlucky, however the poem has interesting views and says "Man is a carnivorous animal... Although his anatomical construction Bears vegetables, in a grumbling way, Your laboring people think beyond all question, Beef, veal, and mutton better for digestion." The poem also offers a beefsteak as the best cure for sea sickness.
LXVII
Man is a carnivorous production,
And must have meals, at least one meal a day;
He cannot live, like woodcocks, upon suction,
But, like the shark and tiger, must have prey;
Although his anatomical construction
Bears vegetables, in a grumbling way,
Your laboring people think beyond all question,
Beef, veal, and mutton better for digestion.
Full Poem: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21700/21700-h/21700-h.htm
Fun instances of searching 'beef':
So Juan stood, bewilder’d on the deck:
The wind sung, cordage strain’d, and sailors swore,
And the ship creak’d, the town became a speck,
From which away so fair and fast they bore.
The best of remedies is a beef-steak
Against sea-sickness: try it, sir, before
You sneer, and I assure you this is true,
For I have found it answer—so may you.
And Juan, too, was help’d out from his dream,
Or sleep, or whatso’er it was, by feeling
A most prodigious appetite: the steam
Of Zoe’s cookery no doubt was stealing
Upon his senses, and the kindling beam
Of the new fire, which Zoe kept up, kneeling
To stir her viands, made him quite awake
And long for food, but chiefly a beef-steak.
But beef is rare within these oxless isles;
Goat’s flesh there is, no doubt, and kid, and mutton;
And, when a holiday upon them smiles,
A joint upon their barbarous spits they put on:
But this occurs but seldom, between whiles,
For some of these are rocks with scarce a hut on;
Others are fair and fertile, among which
This, though not large, was one of the most rich.
I say that beef is rare, and can’t help thinking
That the old fable of the Minotaur—
From which our modern morals rightly shrinking
Condemn the royal lady’s taste who wore
A cow’s shape for a mask—was only (sinking
The allegory) a mere type, no more,
That Pasiphae promoted breeding cattle,
To make the Cretans bloodier in battle.
For we all know that English people are
Fed upon beef—I won’t say much of beer,
Because ’tis liquor only, and being far
From this my subject, has no business here;
We know, too, they very fond of war,
A pleasure—like all pleasures—rather dear;
So were the Cretans—from which I infer
That beef and battles both were owing to her.
But to resume. The languid Juan raised
His head upon his elbow, and he saw
A sight on which he had not lately gazed,
As all his latter meals had been quite raw,
Three or four things, for which the Lord he praised,
And, feeling still the famish’d vulture gnaw,
He fell upon whate’er was offer’d, like
A priest, a shark, an alderman, or pike.
Gary Taubes wrote in his new book The Case For Keto a paragraph that I want to dedicate this database towards:
"I did this obsessive research because I wanted to know what was reliable knowledge about the nature of a healthy diet. Borrowing from the philosopher of science Robert Merton, I wanted to know if what we thought we knew was really so. I applied a historical perspective to this controversy because I believe that understanding that context is essential for evaluating and understanding the competing arguments and beliefs. Doesn’t the concept of “knowing what you’re talking about” literally require, after all, that you know the history of what you believe, of your assumptions, and of the competing belief systems and so the evidence on which they’re based?
This is how the Nobel laureate chemist Hans Krebs phrased this thought in a biography he wrote of his mentor, also a Nobel laureate, Otto Warburg: “True, students sometimes comment that because of the enormous amount of current knowledge they have to absorb, they have no time to read about the history of their field. But a knowledge of the historical development of a subject is often essential for a full understanding of its present-day situation.” (Krebs and Schmid 1981.)