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

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 Locke agreed with Gassendi that animals could think, and he even seems to have been influenced by the ‘Hindu’ doctrine (reported by Rogerius) that humans were only more intelligent than animals because their brains (not their souls) were better constructed. 20

It may also have been thanks to Bernier that, in his widely used educational guidebook Thoughts Concerning Education (1692), Locke joined Gassendi in criticising the custom of weaning children onto meat, suggesting that they would be much healthier if they ‘were kept wholly from flesh the first three or four years of their lives’ – a practice he recognised was hardly likely to catch on among parents who were ‘misled by the custom of eating too much flesh themselves’. Like Bernier, Locke also recommended that most children’s ailments should be cured by ‘abstinence from flesh’, and in a conclusion that foreshadowed the social critiques of later vegetarian doctors, Locke attributed ‘a great part of our diseases in England, to our eating too much flesh, and too little bread’. 21 The anatomical vegetarianism of Gassendi merged with the Indian example observed by Bernier and became a serious foundation for a reassessment of man’s natural diet.

Gassendi stressed that sensory observation was the means by which people acquired knowledge, and this Epicurean methodology underpinned the early Enlightenment’s emphasis on empirical observation. The similarity to Locke’s philosophical mantra has led many to suggest that Locke was deeply indebted to Gassendi, an assumption backed up by the fact that Locke spent hours in conversation with Bernier and owned a copy of the Abrégé. 22 In the hands of Gassendi, Bernier and the members of the Royal Society in London, the vegetarian debate was shifted into this new empirical arena.

Bernier’s observations in India and his trials on his patients provided a new set of empirical data that appeared to substantiate Gassendi’s anatomical argument. Decades later, when John Wallis read about Tyson’s recent meticulous dissection of animals, he remembered Gassendi’s vegetarian treatise, and realised that here was yet another set of data that might shed light on the question. While Gassendi had focused on the morphology of the teeth, Tyson and Wallis extended the enquiry to the shape and function of animals’ guts. Wallis pointed out that herbivores tended to have intestines designed for slow digestion with a large colon and ‘caecum’ (a pouch between the small and large intestine). Carnivores, on the other hand, had little or no colon and the caecum was reduced to a small appendix or was completely absent, indicating a rapid digestion of food.