The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. Tristram Stuart

by God in Eden and by the myths of the classical Golden Age: ‘in this time of innocence,’ Gassendi speculated, ‘man did not want to drench his hands in the blood of animals.’ Because our teeth weren’t properly designed for chewing flesh, he said, they couldn’t cope with all the membranes, tendons and sticky fibres, leaving too much work for our stomachs, overcharging the system with succulent juices and clouding the spirits. Fruit and vegetables, on the other hand were easy to break down into pulp.

      Helmont’s interpretation of the facts was totally different. He insisted that man was a microcosmic combination of all the animals: he had the canine teeth of carnivores and the molar teeth of herbivores, and could be nourished by the flesh of them all. That flesh also tasted delicious and nourished the human body was clear proof that ‘it was permitted to man by his nature, to eat the flesh of animals’.⁹

      Gassendi retorted that the similarities between ourselves and animals – rather than being a mandate for eating them – should teach us to recognise our consanguinity. Taking a sideswipe at ‘a celebrated man’ (presumably Descartes), Gassendi argued that in terms of anatomy ‘monkeys can pride themselves on having the same as us’; ‘notwithstanding they are earthly, they are coeval with us, however much we are used to despising them.’

      ‘So how come you do not abstain from eating meat?’ Gassendi imagined his opponent asking, to which he replied that his nature had been depraved by being brought up a carnivore, and that it would be dangerous to change his diet all of a sudden (a pervasive assumption rooted in ancient medicine¹⁰). But nevertheless, he conceded, ‘I admit that if I were wise, I would abandon this food bit by bit, and nourish myself solely on the gifts of the earth: I do not doubt that I would be happier for longer and more constantly in better health.’¹¹

      It was ironic that Gassendi framed some of his arguments in opposition to Descartes, for this was just the sort of conclusion that Descartes appears to have come to. Perhaps when Descartes and Gassendi had their famous reconciliatory meeting in 1647, this was one of the topics they agreed upon. If the opinion of Descartes’ disciple, Antoine le Grand, is anything to go by, the Gassendists and Cartesians both agreed that humans were naturally herbivorous. In the Entire Body of Philosophy, According to the Principles of the Famous Renate des Cartes (1672), le Grand endorsed every point of Gassendi’s vegetarian argument. The fact that eating raw meat was instinctively repellent, he insisted, shows ‘that Flesh is not our Natural food, being only introduc’d by Lust, which hath quite changed our Nature from its Primigenial Inclination and Temper’. If a boy were raised on a natural fruitarian diet, le Grand speculated, he might ‘not be inferiour to Stags in running, nor to Apes in climbing of Trees’.¹²

      Gassendi’s medical arguments developed into a long-lasting scientific tradition. This received a massive boost in 1678 when his major works were abridged and translated from Latin into French by an ex-pupil who had just returned from travelling in India and was now at the medical faculty of Montpellier.¹³ This vital redactor of Gassendi’s theories was no other than François Bernier, the most influential interpreter of Indian vegetarianism in seventeenth-century Europe – who suggested that abstaining from meat had originally been a rational practice based on the preservation of health and the inculcation of good morals. Although Bernier never said so in his travel writing, he had probably been predisposed to the medical arguments for vegetarianism by Gassendi, his friend and mentor.

      In Bernier’s hands, Gassendi’s vegetarian arguments underwent a fascinating transformation. Gassendi had little empirical evidence that the vegetable diet really was as healthy as he hypothesised, but Bernier used his experience in India to show that vegetarians really were at least as healthy as meat-eaters. So, in Bernier’s Abrégé de la Philosophie de Gassendi, where Gassendi noted that ancient pagan philosophers and Christian ascetics lived on the vegetable diet, Bernier updated this information with the crucial contemporary fact that ‘even now many people of the East Indies still do’. Where Gassendi argued that the fortitude of herbivorous animals suggested that plants were very nourishing, Bernier inserted the comment that ‘the Indians who live on nothing else are just as strong, and at least as healthy as us’.¹⁴ And when Gassendi wrote that Diogenes, Seneca and Lucretius were exemplars of Epicurean frugality, Bernier appended an entire essay on the living ‘Indian Diogenes’, in order, he explained, ‘to shew that all these fine things we have spoken of, are not only bare Philosophical Speculations, but that there are whole Nations, who lead as sparing a Life’. The Brahmins, Banians and naked Indian fakirs eat hardly anything but lentils and rice, never eat flesh, and yet, said Bernier, ‘they live as contented, as quiet, and pleasant as we do, and far more Healthy, at least full as strong and lusty as we are.’¹⁵

      Most intriguing of all – given his professional status as an academic physician – is Bernier’s attention to Indian medicine. Although he did not think much of their anatomical knowledge – and ridiculed them for fleeing every time he cut open an animal alive to demonstrate the circulation of the blood – he did think their medical practice could teach Europeans something, even though it ‘differs essentially from ours’. In his travelogue, Bernier noted that for Indians ‘the sovereign remedy for sickness is abstinence; nothing is worse for a sick body than meat broth.’ This went against the prevailing practice in France where feeble patients were considered in need of ‘strengthening’ with rich meat broths. And yet, Bernier noted that the Indian practice of abstinence from flesh seemed like an effective remedy, used by both Hindus and Muslims alike.¹⁶ In the Abrégé Bernier converted this into a full-blown defence of vegetarianism, arguing that meat broths did more harm than good and that ‘a great part of Asia believe them to be mortal to fever patients, and that this was, apparently, Hippocrates’ opinion, since he usually prescribes them nothing but oat broth’.¹⁷

      Bernier adopted the Indian method of treatment by abstinence from flesh in his own medical practice: ‘I might mention also a Person of great Eminency, who was severely tormented with the Gout, but by my Advice, yielding to live one Year very abstemiously, and scarce to Eat any Flesh (according to the Custom of the Indians, who nevertheless are very healthy and strong, and are rarely troubled with such Distempers) was perfectly cured.’¹⁸ Indeed, Bernier had cured himself of such ailments as soon as he arrived in India. This, he extrapolated, was proof that vegetarianism was a healthy diet for anyone.

      Not only did Bernier’s experience in India turn him away from the use of meat broths in medicine, it even seems to have convinced him that flesh-eating itself was bad for the health. Bernier, who despised Hinduism as a whole, ended up converting – at least on an intellectual plane – to what he saw as one of its principal doctrines.

      Bernier forcefully injected the teaching of Indian medicine into the European tradition at exactly the time that other doctors were starting to revive the ancient Hippocratic use of therapeutic dieting. This was a medical reform that profoundly affected the understanding of lifestyle and which can be seen as the beginning of modern notions about balanced diets, the requirement of fresh vegetables and the nutritional viability of vegetarianism. Bernier thought the Indian doctors were leading the way.

      In the 1670s the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), a doctor himself, spent fifteen months curing his own ailments among medical colleagues in Montpellier. He befriended Bernier, frequently quizzed him about India, avidly making notes in his diary on Indian physiology and metempsychosis; he read his travel narratives, which inspired him to study the other major works on Hinduism by della Valle, Lord, Roe, Ovington and Rogerius, and these provided the variety of cultural perspectives Locke employed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).¹⁹