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Tristram Stuart

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THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION

Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

TRISTRAM STUART

DEDICATION

To my father

SIMON STUART

(1930–2002)

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

I: GRASS ROOTS

1 Bushell’s Bushel, Bacon’s Bacon and The Great Instauration

2 John Robins: The Shakers’ God

3 Roger Crab: Levelling the Food Chain

4 Pythagoras and the Sages of India

5 ‘This proud and troublesome Thing, called Man’: Thomas Tryon, the Brahmin of Britain

6 John Evelyn: Salvation in a Salad

7 The Kabbala Stripped Naked

8 Men Should be Friends even to Brute Beasts: Isaac Newton and the Origins of Pagan Theology

9 Atheists, Deists and the Turkish Spy

II: MEATLESS MEDICINE

10 Dieting with Dr Descartes

11 Tooth and Nail: Pierre Gassendi and the Human Appendix

12 The Mitre and the Microscope: Philippe Hecquet’s Catholic Fast Food

13 Dr Cheyne’s Sensible Diet

14 Clarissa’s Calories

15 Rousseau and the Bosoms of Nature

16 The Counter-Vegetarian Mascot: Pope’s Happy Lamb

17 Antonio Cocchi and the Cure for Scurvy

18 The Sparing Diet: Scotland’s Vegetarian Dynasty

III: ROMANTIC DINNERS

19 Diet and Diplomacy: Eating Beef in the Land of the Holy Cow

20 John Zephaniah Holwell: Voltaire’s Hindu Prophet

21 The Cry of Nature: Killing in the Name of Animal Rights in the French Revolution

22 The Marquis de Valady faces the Guillotine

23 Bloodless Brothers

24 John ‘Walking’ Stewart and the Utility of Death

25 To Kill a Cat: Joseph Ritson’s Politics of Atheism

26 Shelley and the Return to Nature

27 The Malthusian Tragedy: Feeding the World

EPILOGUE

ABBREVIATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NOTES

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES

SECTION ONE

Studio of Jan Brueghel the Elder, ‘Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden’, Flemish, early 17th century. Leeds Museums and Galleries (Lotherton Hall) UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: LMG 142825)

Frans Snyders, ‘The Butcher’s Shop’ c.1640– 50. Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: XIR 47570)

Jan Brueghel the Elder & Peter Paul Rubens, ‘Adam and Eve in Paradise’, c.1615. Mauritshuis, The Hague, The Netherlands/The Bridgeman Art Library (ref: BAL 7152)

David Teniers the Younger, ‘In the Kitchen’, 1669. Noortman, Maastricht, The Netherlands/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: NOR 61586)

Frontispiece of Christopher Plantin ed. ‘Biblia Sacra, Hebraice, Chaldaice, Grace & Latine’, Antwerp, 1569. The British Library, London

Ivory Cabinet, showing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Sri Lanka, late 17th century. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT62950)

Iskandar meeting the Brahmans, India, 1719. From the latter half of a manuscript of Firdawsi’s ‘Shahnama’. The British Library, London (ref: Add. 18804, f.117v)

‘Maître François’ (illuminator), ‘Alexander the Great meeting the Indian ‘‘gymnosophists’’, or naked philosophers’. From St Augustine, ‘La Cité de Dieu’, Books I-X, Paris. 1475– 1480. Koninklijke Bibliotheek National Library of the Netherlands, Den Haag, Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum (ref: MMW, 10 A 11, f. 93v)

Bhairavi Ragini, First Wife of Bhairava Raga, Folio from a Ragamala (Garland of Melodies), Bilaspur, Himachal Pradesh, India, 1685– 1690. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase. Photo © 2006 Museum Associates/LACMA

Banyans and Brahmins, from Jan Huygen van Linschoten, ‘Itinerario’, 1596. The Brenthurst Library, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photograph by Clive Hassall

‘Indian huts’ from Jan Huygen van Linschoten, ‘Itinerario’, 1596. The Brenthurst Library, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photograph by Clive Hassall

John Evelyn’s ‘pietre dure’ cabinet showing Orpheus charming the beasts by Domenico Bennotti & Francesco Ffanelli, 1644– 50. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT64605)

School of Jan Brueghel the Elder, ‘Orpheus charming the animals’, Flemish, c.1600– 10. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Alinari Archives/Corbis

SECTION TWO

Joseph Highmore, ‘The Harlowe Family’ from the illustrations of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, 1747– 8. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: YBA 156350)

Jean Baptiste Greuze, ‘Girl weeping over her Dead Canary’, c.1765. National Gallery of Scotland/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: NGS 230482)

Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun, ‘Self Portrait in a Straw Hat’, 1782. The National Gallery, London

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, ‘The Milkmaid’, before 1784. Louvre, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: XIR 90016)

Frontispiece of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondemens de l’Inegalité ’, Marc Michel, Amsterdam, 1755. The British Library, London

Jean Baptiste Greuze, ‘The White Hat’, by c.1780. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/ The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: BST 216007)

Attributed to Marie Victoire Lemoine, ‘Young Woman with a Dog’, c.1796 Bucharest National Museum of Arts/AKG Images, London

Jean Laurent Mosnier, ‘The Young Mother’, c.1770– 80. Musée Municipal, Macon, France/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: XIR 180450)

Eugene Delacroix, ‘Liberty Leading the People’, 1830. Louvre, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: XIR 3692)

C.J. Grant, ‘Singular effects of the universal pills on a green grocer!’ From ‘Grant’s Oddities’, London, 1841, plate 8. The Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library (ref: V0011125)

‘The Mansion of Bliss. A New Game for the Amusement of Youth’, William Darton, London, 1822. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT26924)

The Old Fort, Playhouse and Holwell’s Monument, Calcutta, from Thomas Daniell, ‘Views of Calcutta’, 1786. The British Library, London (ref: P88, 88)

Attributed to Johann Zoffany, ‘Portrait of John Zephaniah Holwell’, 1765. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (ref: P.961.244)

Marquis de Valady (1766– 1793) and his wife, daughter of the Comte de Vaudreuil.

Courtesy of Christian de Chefdebien

SECTION THREE

Akbar ordering the slaughter to cease, from Abul Fazl’s ‘Akbarnama’, Mughal, c.1590. Johnson Album 8, no 4. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: I.S.2– 1896)

King Solomon and the animals, from the ‘Iyar-i-Danish’ c.1595. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (ref: CBL In. 4.74)

Majnun and the hunter, from an illustrated ‘Silsilat al-Zahab’, Akbar’s court, India, 1613. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (ref: CBL In. 8.61)

Top-cover of pen box, signed by Manohar, India, Deccan, late 17th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky Fund, 2002 (2002.416 ab)

Jewel casket, detail of lady holding tree, attributed to Rahim Deccani. Deccan (or probably Golconda) or Kashmir, India, c.1660. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT104143)

Jewel casket, detail of seated European, attributed to Rahim Deccani. Deccan (or probably Golconda) or Kashmir, India, c.1660. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT104144)

The ‘pietre dure’ Orpheus on Shah Jahan’s Throne in the Hall of Public Audiences in the Red Fort, New Delhi, India, by Ebba Koch. Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, Graz, Austria, 1988

Todi Ragini, Second Wife of Hindol Raga, Folio from a ‘Ragamala’ (Garland of Melodies), Jaipur, India, c.1750. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase. Photo © 2006 Museum Associates/LACMA

Detail of an illustrated vijnaptipatra, by Ustad Salivahana, AD 1610. Courtesy of Shri Jitendra Shah, Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology, Navrangpur, Gujarat, India.

Illustration from the ‘Lalitavistara’ by the Buddhist Scribe Amrtananda: commissioned by Captain Knox, an officer of the East India. Company’s army, resident in Nepal in 1803– 4. The British Library, London (ref: I.O. SAN 688)

James Fraser, ‘A street scene in the village of Raniya’, 1816– 20. The British Library, London (ref: Add.Or.4057)

James Gillray, ‘French Liberty and British Slavery’, London, c.1789. The British Library, London/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: BL 22564)

James Gillray, ‘Consequences of a Successful French Invasion or We teach de English Republicans to work’, London, c.1798. The Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: NCO 190453)

James Gillray, ‘Temperance enjoying a frugal meal’ (Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz; King George III), 1792. The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D12461)

James Gillray, ‘A voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion’ (King George IV), 1792. The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D12460)

James Gillray, ‘New morality …’, London, 1798. The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D13093)

Edward Hicks, ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’, c.1840– 5. Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: TBM 84503)

INTEGRATED

Thomas Bushell, the Superlative Prodigall, from Thomas Bushell, ‘The First Part of Youth Errors’ (London, 1628). The British Library, London

Golden Age, from ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ (London, 1732). The British Library, London (ref: 11375.aa.23)

Ranters and Shakers, from George Hall ‘The Declaration of John Robins, the false Prophet, otherwise called the Shakers God’ (London, 1651). The British Library, London

A naked rout of Ranters, from John Collins ‘Strange Newes from Newgate’ (London, 1650/1). The British Library, London (ref: E.622.3)

Naked Adamites, from Obadiah Couchman, ‘The Adamites Sermon’ (F. Cowles: London, 1641). The British Library, London

Roger Crab’s horoscope consultation with William Lilly, ‘de Revelatione’. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, England. (ref: MS Ashmole 427 f. 51v)

Roger Crab, ‘The English Hermite’ (London, 1655). The National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG D2220)

Illuminated letter S, from Roger Crab, ‘The English Hermite’ (London, 1655), p. 2. The British Library, London (ref: G.1024.E.826.1)

Jan van Grevenbroeck, Marco Polo in Tartar Attire. Museo Correr, Venice/ The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: XIR 34703)

Indian cow worship, from the frontispiece of Thomas Herbert, ‘A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile, Begunne Anno 1626 Into Afrique … and some parts of the Orientall Indies’ (William Stansby: London, 1634). The British Library, London

Brahmin with cow, from Frontispiece of Henry Lord, ‘A Display of two forraigne sects in the East Indies’ (London, 1630). The British Library, London (ref: 147.a.20)

Horoscope of the Nativity of Thomas Tryon’s daughter, from John Gadbury, ‘Collectio Geniturarum’ (London, 1661/2), p. 195. The British Library, London

Robert White, Portrait of Thomas Tryon after unknown artist. From Thomas Tryon, ‘The Knowledge Of A Man’s Self ’ (T. Bennet: London, 1703). The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D8242)

Naked Adamites, from Bernard Picart, ‘Ceremonies et Coutumes Religieuses de Tous Les Peuples Du Monde ( J.F. Bernard: Amsterdam, 1736). The British Library, London (ref: IV.213)

Drawing by John Evelyn of the Evelyn family house at Wotton, Surrey, from the terrace above the gardens, 1653. The Trustees of the British Museum, London

From Knorr von Rosenroth et al., eds, ‘Kabbalæ Denudatæ’, Volume II. ( J.D. Zunneri: Frankfurt, 1684). The British Library, London

Illustration of a Slaughterhouse and Butchering Tools from Denis Diderot et al., ‘Encyclopedia’ 1751. Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis

Isaac Newton, ‘Irenicum’. King’s College Library, Cambridge (ref: Keynes 3, f.5)

Illustration from the eight volumes of ‘Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy’ (London, 1692– 4). The British Library, London (ref: 1482.bb.25)

Edward Tyson’s chimpanzee before and after dissection, from Edward Tyson, ‘Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris’ (Thomas Bennet et al.: London, 1699). The British Library, London

Portrait of George Cheyne. Edinburgh University Library, Sir William Thomason-Walker Collection (Licensor www.scran.ac.uk)

William Hogarth’s Stage One from the ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’. William Hogarth/V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: JX1832)

‘Equality’ engraved by L. Gautier, c.1793/4 after Antoine Boizot. Musee de la Revolution Francaise, Visille, France/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: REV 131559)

‘The Interior of a Native Hut’ from A. Colin, ‘Twenty four Plates illustrating Hindoo & European Manners in Bengal … after sketches by Mrs c. Belnos’ (Smith & Elder: London, 1832), plate 14. V&A Images/ Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT69834)

Roberto de Nobili dressed as Indian ‘sanyassin’. The British Library, London (ref: 4869.dd.15.T17343)

James Gillray, frontispiece of John Oswald, ‘The Cry of Nature’ ( J. Johnson: London, 1791). The British Library, London (ref: 1388b.26)

James Sayers, ‘John Bull’s sacrifice to Janus’ (Hannah Humphrey: London,1794). The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D12257)

Woodcut by Bewick, from George Nicholson, ‘On the Conduct of Man to Inferior Animals’ (G. Nicholson: Manchester; Whitrow: London, 1797). Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, England (ref: Johnson f. 235)

Richard Newton, ‘A Blow Up at Breakfast!’ (W. Holland: London, 1792). The Trustees of the British Museum, London (ref: PD 8092)

‘John Stewart’ by Henry Hoppner Meyer, after J.E.H. Robinson. The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D4935)

James Sayers, ‘Caricature of Joseph Ritson’, 1803. The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D9623)

Title illustration from ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley (1797– 1851). Engraved by Theodor M. von Holst. Bridgeman Art Library (ref: XJF 105430)

Mahatma Gandhi at the Vegetarian Society, 1931, seated next to the socialist reformer, Henry Salt. Courtesy of Jon Wynne Tyson/West Sussex Wildlife Protection

‘Waldesfrieden’ from Richard Ungewitter, ‘Nacktheit und Kultur’, 1913. The British Library, London

‘Heil Goring!’ from Kladderadatsch, 1933. From ‘The Nazi War on Cancer’ by Robert N. Proctor. (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1999)

Der Führer als Tierfreund. Nazi propaganda material, c.1936. AKG Images, London

INTRODUCTION

Stranded in the countryside and confronted with a live chicken which he has to roast, Withnail is paralysed. ‘I think you should strangle it instantly,’ says his anxious friend Peter, ‘in case it starts trying to make friends with us.’ ‘I can’t,’ he adds, ‘those dreadful, beady eyes’ (Bruce Robinson, Withnail & I (1987)). In 1714 the philosophical wit, Bernard Mandeville, mused on a very similar predicament: ‘I question whether ever any body so much as killed a Chicken without Reluctancy the first time,’ he commented wryly, ‘yet all of them feed heartily and without Remorse on Beef, Mutton and Fowls when they are bought in the Market.’¹ Western society has fostered a culture of caring for animals; and it has maintained humanity’s right to kill and eat them. Today, negotiating compassion with the desire to eat is customary, and there are clearly defined lifestyles available for each person’s particular taste. But it was only after the word ‘vegetarian’ was coined in the 1840s, followed by the formation of the Vegetarian Society in 1847, that ‘vegetarianism’ was applied to a distinct movement that could easily be pigeon-holed, and ignored. Before that, meat-eating was an open question that concerned everyone and it affected not just people’s choice of diet but their fundamental ideas about man’s status on earth.^*

In the era preceding the Industrial Revolution the question of meat-eating was one of the fiercest battle-fronts in the struggle to define humanity’s proper relationship with nature. The vital question: ‘should humans be eating animals?’ was a serious challenge to Western society’s belief that the world and everything in it had been made exclusively for mankind. Vegetarians called for a wholesale reappraisal of the human relationship with nature. Man was lord of the creation: but what kind of a lord, vegetarians asked, ate his own subjects?

It started with the Bible – with the very first chapter of Genesis. The first words God said to Adam and Eve after creating the world were: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ (Genesis 1:28). In the remote world of fourth-century BC Athens, this view was echoed with remarkable consonance by Aristotle, probably the most revered authority in Western culture after the Scriptures: ‘plants are created for the sake of animals, and the animals for the sake of men’.² These two pillars of cultural authority provided a religious and philosophical sanction for humanity’s predatory instincts (a characteristic of hominid behaviour which arose more than a million years ago). Anything that wasn’t recognisably Homo sapiens stood little chance of being valued beyond its basic utility. But there were always counter-currents and cracks in the edifice, and it was into these fractures that vegetarians thrust their cultural crowbars.

Man was lord of the earth; but in what, exactly, did his dominion consist? In the beginning at least, according to the Bible, man’s dominion over the animals apparently did not include killing them – for the very next thing God had said to Adam and Eve was: ‘Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed … and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat’ (Genesis 1:29). From this primeval culinary instruction most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theologians deduced that Adam and Eve were restricted to eating fruit and plants, and all creatures lived together in herbivorous peace. It was only much later (1,600 years by standard chronology), when the earth had been destroyed and wed again in Noah’s Flood, that God altered the charter to mankind.³ When Noah came down from the Ark, God told him, ‘the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things’ (Genesis 9:2–3). As the scholar John Edwards explained with relish in 1699, this was as much as to say, ‘you have as free liberty now, since the Flood, to eat the Flesh of every living Creature, as you had before the Flood to feed on every sort of Herbs and Fruits, tho you were stinted as to Flesh. This is the clear sense and import of the words; and consequently proves, that eating Flesh before the Flood was unlawful.’

The friction between God’s permission to prey upon animals and the ideal of mankind in harmony with creation produced a fault line which vegetarians sought to magnify. Even as the biblical strictures faded in society, equivalent values remained prevalent, and their legacy can still be traced in modern society, particularly in the deep-rooted beliefs on either side of the environmental debate.

Meat-eating came under fire from a spectacular array of viewpoints in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Revolutionaries attacked the bloodthirsty luxury of mainstream culture; demographers accused the meat industry of wasting resources which could otherwise be used to feed people; anatomists claimed that human intestines were not equipped to digest meat, and travellers to the East presented India as a peaceful alternative to the rapacity of the West. Radicals and eccentrics contested their society’s values head on; but many of the era’s foremost thinkers also wrangled over the issues, leading to a reassessment of human nature. The luxury of choosing to abstain from meat may have been restricted to small sectors of European society, but these often drew their inspiration from the underfed poor who seemed to live, and labour, without needing vast quantities of meat. The cultural elites in turn influenced agronomic, medical and economic policies which determined the diets of populations as a whole.

The arguments that raged in the formative period between 1600 and 1830 helped to shape the values of modern society. Understanding the history of our ideas sets modern culture in a striking new light and can overturn our most entrenched assumptions. The early history of vegetarianism reveals how ancient ethics of abstinence, early medical science and Indian philosophy have influenced Western culture in profound and unexpected ways.

Returning to a state of harmony free from carnage became a fervent wish for many in the seventeenth century; it remained an idyllic dream even for those who recognised its impossibility. It was part of what can be called prelapsarianism: the desire to return to the perfection enjoyed by mankind before Adam and Eve’s ‘lapse’ in Paradise. Prelapsarians often wished to reinstate the harmonious relationship with the animals enjoyed in Eden. Their ‘dominion’ would be benevolent and kind, not a savage tyranny: an ideal which seventeenth-century radicals used in their attack on oppression and violence in human society.

In 1642 civil war broke out between Royalists and Parliamentarians, plunging England into years of bloodshed. Men and women of all political stripes searched for an alternative to the anarchy around them by trying to recreate a society based on paradisal peace and harmony. The Royalist Thomas Bushell followed his master Francis Bacon’s advice by testing whether the primeval diet was the key to long life and spiritual perfection. On the radical wing of the Parliamentary faction, puritanical fighters for democracy used vegetarianism to articulate their dissent from the luxurious mainstream, and called for a bloodless revolution to institute a slaughter-free society of equality. Religious extremists chimed in with the announcement that God dwelt within the creatures and mankind should therefore treat them all with love and kindness.

One other external force joined the fray, exerting a surprising influence on Western culture. European travellers to India ‘discovered’ the ancient Indian religions and the fascinating doctrine of ahimsa, or non-violence to all living things. They interrogated Hindus and Jains on its philosophical ramifications; with astonishment, they observed animal hospitals, widespread vegetarianism and extraordinary kindness even to the most lowly creatures. News of Indian vegetarianism proved a radical challenge to Christian ideas of human dominance, and it contributed to a crisis in the European conscience. To many it seemed that the idealists’ dreams had become a reality. Vegetarians got down on their knees, calling on the ancient Indian philosophers to lead humanity away from its state of corruption and bloodshed.

Europe’s encounter with Indian vegetarianism had a massive impact well beyond the radical fringe. A thriving trade in travel literature inflamed the eager inquiries of serious philosophers and fuelled the curiosity of a wide popular audience. The travellers themselves tended to ridicule Indian vegetarianism as absurd soft-heartedness, but many readers saw in the Indian system a powerful and appealing moral code. Members of the philosophical establishment – John Evelyn, Sir Thomas Browne and Sir William Temple – recognised that the Indian vegetarians proved that people could live happily on the original fruit and vegetable diet. Sir Isaac Newton’s reading about Eastern sages helped to convince him that ‘Mercy to Beasts’ was one of God’s first and most fundamental laws from which Europeans had long since apostatized. Sceptics at the end of the seventeenth century used Indian vegetarianism to plant a powerful blow on European religious and social orthodoxies, arguing that Indians upheld the original law of nature: to do unto others (including animals) as you would be done by.

The impact of Indian vegetarianism vitally influenced a shift away from the Bible’s mandate of unlimited dominion. It encouraged people to imagine that broadening the sphere of ethical responsibility was beneficial for humans as well as for nature itself. Indian philosophy – and principally the doctrine of ahimsa – triggered a debate that has evolved over time into the modern ecological crisis.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of immense scientific development. New discoveries and systematising theories emerged from all over Western Europe and filtered out into the widely educated population. Microscopes plunged the observing eye into thitherto invisible worlds; surgical explorations opened up concealed areas of the human body; ever-growing tables of astronomical observations from bigger and better observatories drove human knowledge deeper into space; accumulated navigational skills extended the known world almost to its limits, bringing new peoples and new species under the scrutiny of Enlightenment science – or ‘Natural Philosophy’ as the discipline was then known. If the vegetarian argument was to prosper it would have to keep up with the times and adapt its logic to modern systems of thought. Vegetarians developed elaborate scientific ways of defending their philosophy, and plugged their views into the main channels of Enlightenment thought.

Intrepid investigations with the scalpel confirmed that the human body was almost identical to that of apes and very similar to other animals, which put the study of anatomy and physiology centre-stage in philosophical debate. Man was partly an animal: but scientists wanted to know exactly what sort of animal, herbivore or carnivore? A substantial sector of the intellectual world concluded that the human body, in its original form, was designed to be herbivorous – thus substantiating the scriptural evidence that the primeval diet was fruit and herbs.

Science flourished in the eighteenth century, but it was founded on the schism with received modes of thought engineered by the philosophers René Descartes and his vitally important rival, Pierre Gassendi. Within their new frameworks, Descartes and Gassendi set to work on the most pressing questions: the nature of the soul, of man, and man’s place between God and nature. Contrary to all expectations, both Gassendi and Descartes agreed that vegetarianism could be the most suitable diet for humans. Amazingly, three of Europe’s most important early seventeenth-century philosophers – Descartes, Gassendi and Francis Bacon – all advocated vegetarianism. At no time before or since has vegetarianism been endorsed by such a formidable array of intellectuals, and by the 1700s their pioneering work had blossomed into a powerful movement of scientific vegetarianism.

Anatomists noticed that human teeth and intestines were more akin to those of herbivores than those of carnivores. Dieticians argued that meat did not break down in the digestive system, clogging blood circulation, whereas tender vegetables easily dissolved into an enriching fluid. Neural scientists discovered that animals have nerves capable of exquisite suffering, just as humans do, and this was discomfiting for people who based their entire moral philosophy on the principle of sympathy. At the same time, the study of Indian populations indicated that abstinence from meat could be conducive to health and long life. This helped to transform the image of vegetarianism from a radical political statement into a sound medical system. The idea that the vegetarian diet could be the most natural was so astonishingly prevalent in university medical faculties across Europe that it appears to have been close to a scientific orthodoxy.