Reminiscences of an old physician / Robert Bell.

  • Bell, Robert, 1845-1926.
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Reminiscences of an old physician / Robert Bell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    attention to dietetics, both as a preventive of disease and as a curative agent. He has strong views upon the beneficial effects of abstaining entirely from butcher’s meat and adopting a diet which is in complete harmony with the physiological and anatomical relations of the alimentary canal. Cooking, he believes, reduces the food value of every article of diet by two-thirds, and renders it less digestible. He therefore is of opinion that as much as possible uncooked fruit and vegetables, together with cheese, eggs and milk, should constitute the principal diet of a man or woman who wishes to retain health and survive to a healthy old age. His conviction is that, were such a diet adopted generally, disease would rapidly disappear and cancer would be non-existent. This contention he bases on the fact that the cells of the body require living and not dead material to supply them with the particular form of nutrition, which can only be derived from vegetables and fruit in their natural ripened condition—in other words when they have been cooked by the sun. While he prefers an uncooked diet of vegetables and fruit, he does not bar the cooking of such vegetables as cauliflower, cabbages, potatoes, etc. New Ideas always Unwelcome. Men who have advanced new ideas have always from the earliest days of history been greeted with scorn and contumely by their contemporaries. In art, science, religion, music, politics, philosophy, drama, it has been the same. Euripides, Socrates, Galileo, Wagner, the pre-Raphaelites, Columbus, Lister, Marconi, the brothers Wright—hardly a great name in the history of progress has escaped. And the harshest and bitterest critics have always been fellow-craftsmen who have followed the beaten track. “ It is most difficult to overcome the prejudices of the medical profession,” said a famous London physician to the Daily Mirror last night. “ Lord Lister, when he introduced his antiseptic treatment, was scorned by his profession; Harvey, when he discovered the circulation of the blood, was ridiculed; and the introduction of the stethoscope was almost laughed out of the country.”