At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the dining tables of France became the battlefield for an unexpected alliance. Scientific discovery was suddenly woven into the ancient fabric of Catholic fasting, creating a powerful new justification for the meatless diet. While early Church fathers like Saint Clement and Saint John Chrysostom had long warned that meat was a luxury that inflamed human passions, the Catholic Church historically avoided declaring meat-eating an outright sin. Doing so risked the taint of ancient heresies. Instead, the Church established a calendar of periodic fasting, banishing meat on holy days and during the forty days of Lent. In France, this institutionalized discipline created a fertile ground where a new kind of medical philosophy could take root.
Unlike in Protestant England, where critics dismissed fasting as a superstitious popish plot, the French religious establishment embraced physical self-denial. Armand-Jean de Rancé, a former courtier who turned to intense asceticism after a personal tragedy, revitalized the Cistercian monastery of La Trappe. He banned meat, dairy, and fish, demonstrating to the public that rigorous physical labor could be sustained on a purely plant-based diet. When medical pamphlets began suggesting that year-round abstinence from flesh was the secret to vitality, they did not face immediate condemnation. Instead, they built upon a deeply entrenched religious tradition.
At the heart of this intellectual convergence stood Philippe Hecquet, a Parisian physician who sought to unite the laboratory with the altar. Born in the seventeenth century and educated at Reims, Hecquet found his calling as the personal doctor to a noblewoman retiring to the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal-des-Champs. Immersing himself in their harsh, ascetic lifestyle, he walked miles to treat the poor while rejecting the luxury of carriages. This intense experience convinced him that the human body thrived on meager fare. When he returned to Paris to establish a successful practice, he was appalled by what he saw as an epidemic of national decadence.
Paris was losing its moral grip. Hecquet calculated that while only hundreds of people had sought medical exemptions to eat meat during Lent a few generations prior, tens of thousands were now bribing doctors and priests for certificates. Wealthy citizens even classified ducks, otters, and porpoises as fish to bypass the fast. To combat this spiritual and physical decay, Hecquet launched a medical campaign against meat. He called his approach theological medicine, a philosophy designed to prove that the laws of nature perfectly aligned with the laws of God.
To make his case, Hecquet turned to the cutting-edge physics of his day. Doctors like William Harvey had recently mapped the circulation of blood, and philosophers like René Descartes had popularized the idea of the body as a complex machine. This school of thought, known as iatromechanics, viewed the human body as an intricate hydraulic system of pipes, pumps, and valves. Health depended entirely on the free, unimpeded flow of bodily fluids. Sickness was merely a mechanical failure, a blockage in the plumbing, or blood that had grown too thick to circulate.
Armed with the microscopic discoveries of Marcello Malpighi and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Hecquet constructed his physical argument against flesh. Leeuwenhoek had observed tiny blood globules struggling to squeeze through microscopic capillaries. Hecquet argued that the thick, heavy globules found in animal meat clogged these delicate pathways. Animal fat blocked vital membranes and stiffened the body’s fibers, leading to inflammatory diseases.
The mechanics of the stomach offered further proof. Rejecting the old theory that food was dissolved by chemical fermentation, Hecquet embraced the idea that digestion was a process of physical grinding. The jaw acted as a millstone, and the stomach muscles crushed food with immense force, aided by millions of microscopic fibers. The most natural diet was therefore the food that could be ground most easily into a smooth, milky cream called chyle. Heavy, fibrous meat resisted this mechanical breakdown. Seeds, grains, and fruits, however, melted easily into a life-giving juice. Human teeth, Hecquet argued, were clearly designed to crush plants rather than tear flesh.
Hecquet was not alone in his crusade. In the 1730s, he discovered a kindred spirit across the English Channel in Dr. George Cheyne. Cheyne had also studied iatromechanics and was championing a vegetable diet to cure the chronic ailments of the British elite. Together, these two physicians represented an informal European movement that sought to validate vegetarianism through clinical observation. They compiled evidence of extraordinary longevity, pointing to individuals like Thomas Parr, who reportedly lived past his hundred and fiftieth year on a simple peasant diet. They also highlighted vast, healthy populations around the globe, from the rice-eating peoples of the East to the frugal peasants of Ireland and Spain, who lived long and robust lives without consuming flesh.
Such radical ideas inevitably provoked a fierce backlash from the medical establishment. Nicolas Andry de Boisregard, a prominent medical authority, vigorously defended the traditional chemical view of digestion. He pointed out that snakes digested frog bones without any grinding muscles and argued that tender meat was far easier for the human stomach to process than raw roots or tough fish. Satirists also seized upon Hecquet’s extreme frugality. In his famous novel, Gil Blas, Alain-René Lesage caricatured the physician as Doctor Sangrado, a skeletal doctor who warned a gouty patient that eating juicy meat was a poisoned pleasure and that true health lay in boiled apples and pure water.
Despite the mockery, Hecquet never wavered. He spent his final years living among the Carmelites of Paris, continuing his correspondence with the greatest scientific minds of Europe until his death in 1737. His life’s work demonstrated that the microscope did not have to contradict the Bible. By translating the ancient rules of religious self-denial into the language of cardiovascular health, he helped lay the foundation for the modern understanding of dietary medicine.
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]