diet is a security against disease, especially against
epidemics, whether in the form of a mere influenza or malignant fever.
Nay, there is reason to believe that a person living according to _all_
the Creator's laws, physical and moral, could hardly receive or
communicate disease of any kind. How could a person in perfect health,
and obeying to an iota all the laws of health--how could he contract
disease? What would there be in his system which could furnish a nidus
for its reception?

I am well aware that not a few people suppose the most healthy are as
much exposed to disease as others, and that there are some who even
suppose they are much more so. "Death delights in a shining mark," or
something to this effect, is a maxim which has probably had its origin
in the error to which I have adverted. To the same source may be traced
the strange opinion that a fatal or malignant disease makes its first
and most desperate attacks upon the healthy and the robust. The fact
is--and this explains the whole riddle--those who are regarded, by the
superficial and short-sighted in this matter, as the most healthy and
robust, are usually persons whose unhealthy habits have already sown the
seeds of disease; and nothing is wanting but the usual circumstances of
epidemics to rouse them into action. More than all this, these
strong-looking but inwardly-diseased persons are almost sure to die
whenever disease does attack them, simply on account of the previous
abuses of their constitutions.

During the prevalence of the cholera in New York, about the year 1832,
all the Grahamites, as they were called, who had for some time abstained
from animal food--and their number was quite respectable--and who
persevered in it, either wholly escaped the disease, or had it very
lightly; and this, too, notwithstanding a large proportion of them were
very much exposed to its attacks, living in the parts of the city where
it most prevailed, or in families where others were dying almost daily.
This could not be the result of mere accident; it is morally impossible.

But flesh-eaters--admitting the flesh were wholesome--are not only much
more liable to contract disease, but if they contract it, to suffer more
severely than others. There is yet another important consideration which
belongs to the medical argument. Animal food is much more liable than
vegetable food, to those changes or conditions which we call poisonous,
and which are always, in a grea