In the early years of the eighteenth century, a medical revolution quieted the chemical bubbling of the human stomach and replaced it with the relentless grinding of a machine. At the center of this transformation stood Philippe Hecquet, a Parisian physician who viewed the human body as a complex hydraulic network of pipes, pumps, and levers. For Hecquet, digestion bypassed chemical fermentation entirely, relying instead on the intense physical labor of the gut.
Inside the stomach, the surrounding muscles exerted an incredible force that contemporary mathematicians calculated to total over four hundred and sixty thousand pounds. This massive grinding action found its ultimate assistance on the inside of the gut. Here, millions of microscopic villi acted like motorized fibres. Hecquet described these structures as a million motorized kitchen hands, tirelessly kneading and crushing the food until it dissolved into a fine, delicate cream called chyle.
This mechanical view of the stomach became the cornerstone of Hecquet’s crusade for a fleshless diet. If digestion was a process of physical grinding, then the food that could be reduced most easily to a smooth pulp was the most natural diet for mankind. Seeds, grains, and fruits easily melted into a milky juice under the pressure of the gut. Meat, on the other hand, was tough, fibrous, and highly resistant to the stomach’s motorized hands. Comparative anatomy further supported his views, as Hecquet agreed that human teeth were designed to crush plants and grains rather than tear flesh.
Hecquet warned that eating meat did violence to the body’s delicate hydraulic pipework. Relying on recent microscopic observations of capillaries, Hecquet argued that the cumbersome blood globules found in flesh choked the narrow vessels of the human circulatory system. Animal fat clogged the lymph and the porosity of the body’s membranes, while heavy animal fibres caused the nerves and blood vessels to stiffen. The result of this internal traffic jam was a host of inflammatory diseases. To Hecquet, eating meat was both physically destructive and deeply inefficient. He argued that vegetables were virgin juices, whereas animal flesh was merely a second-hand, pre-digested meal that carried a stain of prostitution from the various biological processes it had already undergone.
This scientific critique fit perfectly within Hecquet’s wider philosophy of theological medicine. As a young doctor, Hecquet had worked at the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal-des-Champs, where he embraced a harsh ascetic lifestyle. He walked miles to treat the poor, rejecting the luxury of carriages and sustaining his grueling schedule on meager, fleshless foods. When he returned to Paris, he was horrified by the growing decadence of the city. He observed that the traditional system of obtaining medical certificates to escape the Lenten fast was widely abused. In a single lifetime, the number of people buying beef during Lent in Paris had ballooned from several hundred to thirty-seven thousand. For Hecquet, reviving the strict fast was a matter of national and spiritual urgency.
Hecquet was not alone in his dietary campaign. In the 1730s, he recognized a brother-in-arms across the English Channel in Dr. George Cheyne, another mathematically minded physician who promoted a vegetable diet. Together, their shared ideas forged a medical vegetarian movement across Europe. They compiled evidence of healthy, long-lived vegetarians around the world, pointing to the historical example of Thomas Parr, who reportedly lived for over a hundred and fifty years on simple peasant food. They also highlighted entire populations, including the rice-eating peoples of the East, Spanish and Italian peasants, and the millions of monks and hermits who thrived without touching flesh. Hecquet concluded that such a universal preference must be an innate impression written into human nature itself.
Yet, Hecquet’s rigorous theories provoked sharp resistance from his medical peers. Nicolas Andry de Boisregard, the Master of the Faculty of Medicine, publicly refuted Hecquet’s mechanical model. Andry argued that digestion was indeed a process of fermentation, pointing out that a snake’s thin stomach could dissolve frog bones without any crushing force. He also asserted that tender meat was far easier to digest than the tough roots and salted fish Hecquet recommended.
The physician’s extreme asceticism also made him a prime target for literary satire. In his famous picaresque novel, Alain-René Lesage caricatured Hecquet as Dr. Sangrado, a fanatical doctor who blamed a patient’s gout on the consumption of juicy meats and rich broths, advising him instead to live on pure water and boiled apples.
Despite the mockery and the professional disputes, Hecquet never wavered. He retired to live among the religious Carmelites of Faubourg Saint-Jacques, where he continued to correspond with Europe’s leading medical minds. When he died in 1737, he was buried in the Carmelite church, leaving behind a legacy that attempted to prove, through the lens of the microscope and the laws of mechanics, that a simple life of abstinence was the ultimate design for human health.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: The Bloodless Revolution
- Subtitle: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India (Part 1: Grass Roots & Part 2: Meatless Medicine – Excerpt)
- Author: Tristram Stuart
- Publisher: HarperPress (An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, London)
- Publication Year: 2006 (EPub Edition: August 2012)
- Edition: First Edition (EPub)
- ISBN: 9780007404926
- Historical Period Covered: c. 1600–1830 (with a primary focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tracing classical Greek, Roman, and ancient Indian antecedents).
- Main Subject Areas: History of Vegetarianism, Intellectual History, Cross-Cultural Exchange (Indo-European relations), Radical Religious and Political Movements of the English Civil War, Early Modern Medicine, Natural Philosophy, and Scepticism.
[Ch. 12]