During the early eighteenth century, the streets of Paris witnessed a quiet but fierce conflict over what belonged on the dinner table. The traditional rules of Lent, which mandated forty days of abstinence from meat, were collapsing under the weight of widespread evasion. Historically, only the genuinely sick could secure an exemption to eat meat, a process that required a doctor’s endorsement, a priest’s countersign, and a visit to the single licensed Lent butcher at the Hôtel-Dieu. However, a wave of bribery, black-market deals, and creative excuses had completely subverted the system. Decades earlier, only about four hundred and fifty Parisians sought these fast-exemption certificates. By the early 1700s, that number had skyrocketed to thirty-seven thousand people buying beef during the holy season. Hungry citizens even stretched the definition of fish to include ducks, otters, and porpoises.
To the prominent Parisian physician Philippe Hecquet, this sudden shift was a moral and physical disaster. He calculated that Paris had become eighty-three times more decadent in just a single lifetime, and he viewed the evasion of the Lent fast as a dangerous slide toward Protestant laxity. Hecquet was no stranger to self-denial. At the age of twenty-seven, he had become the personal physician to the noblewoman Catherine-Françoise de Bretagne at the convent of Port-Royal-des-Champs. Immersing himself in the convent’s harsh Jansenist lifestyle, Hecquet walked miles to treat the poor and lived on meager foods. Though his friends feared the intense deprivations would ruin his health, Hecquet spent the rest of his life arguing that a fleshless, monastic diet was highly invigorating.
After establishing a successful practice in Paris, Hecquet integrated his medical knowledge with his religious convictions to launch a campaign against meat. He aligned himself with the popular medical theory of iatromechanics, which viewed the human body as a complex machine made of pipes, pumps, and forces. This school of thought drew on William Harvey’s discovery of blood circulation and the pioneering work of René Descartes. Using primitive microscopes, scientists like Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and Marcello Malpighi had recently observed blood globules passing through tiny capillaries. Hecquet adapted these findings to argue that eating meat introduced thick, cumbersome globules into the hydraulic system of the body, which slowed circulation and clogged lymph vessels. He warned that animal fat blocked essential membranes and that eating flesh caused the body’s delicate fibers to stiffen, causing inflammatory diseases.
Hecquet also championed a revolutionary mechanical view of digestion. While traditional doctors believed that food fermented in the stomach through acids, Hecquet and his colleagues argued that digestion was actually a mechanical process of crushing and grinding. He supported calculations suggesting that the stomach exerted over four hundred and sixty thousand pounds of force, aided by millions of motorized fibers on the gut wall that kneaded food into a smooth, milky cream called chyle. In Hecquet’s view, seeds, grains, and fruits were the natural foods of humanity because they easily dissolved into this milky state. Meat was too fibrous and tough to grind efficiently. He pointed to human teeth as anatomical proof that humans were meant to eat plants. To Hecquet, eating meat was not only unhealthy but also highly inefficient, since eating animals meant consuming second-hand vegetables that carried a stain of prostitution from passing through another creature’s body.
Hecquet envisioned his work as part of an international effort to promote the health benefits of a vegetarian diet. He found a kindred spirit in the Scottish physician George Cheyne, who advocated for a vegetable-based diet in England. The two doctors pointed to historical examples of longevity, such as the famous English farmer Thomas Parr, who lived for over one hundred and fifty-two years on a simple, frugal diet. Hecquet also compiled empirical evidence from around the world, noting that millions of people lived long, healthy lives without meat. He pointed to the Tartars, the Irish, the Scottish, the Spanish, the Italians, and the Brahmins of India, along with countless monks and hermits, as living proof that a fleshless diet was a natural human inclination.
Hecquet’s radical views did not go unchallenged by the Parisian medical establishment. Nicolas Andry de Boisregard, the Master of the Faculty of Medicine, launched a direct attack on Hecquet’s theories. As a defender of the chemical fermentation theory of digestion, Andry questioned how a snake’s thin stomach could digest frog bones through grinding alone. He also pointed out that whole berries often passed through the human body undamaged, which disproved the idea of extreme crushing forces in the gut. Andry argued that tender meat was far easier to digest than raw roots or cod, and noted that humans possessed hands to make knives and cook food because their teeth could not grind raw grains without mills. Beyond academic debates, Hecquet also faced public mockery. The novelist Alain-René Lesage satirized him in his book, The Adventures of Gil Blas, through the character of Dr. Sangrado, a doctor who alarmingly told his elderly, gout-ridden patient that eating juicy meat was a poisoned pleasure and that he should live instead on water and boiled apples.
Despite the intense criticism and satire, Hecquet remained completely devoted to his dietary philosophy. In 1726, at the age of sixty-five, he retired to live with the Carmelites of Faubourg Saint-Jacques, where he continued writing and corresponding with leading European physicians. When he died in 1737, he was buried in the Carmelites’ church, leaving behind a legacy that attempted to unite the laws of the Church with the mechanical laws of science.
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]