Noble and courageous words! Courageous as coming from an eminent member of a profession--which almost rivals the legal or even the clerical, in opposition to all change in the established order of things. In Dr. Cheyne’s days such interested or bigoted opposition was even stronger than in the present time. From the period of the final establishment of his health, about 1728, little is known of his life excepting through his writings. Almost all we know is, that he continued some fifteen years to practise in London and in Bath with distinguished reputation and success. He had married a daughter of Dr. Middleton of Bristol by whom he had several children. His only son was born in 1712. Amongst his intimate friends was the celebrated Dr. Arbuthnot, a Scotchman like himself, and we find him meeting Sir Hans Sloane and Dr. Mead at the bedside of his friend and relative Bishop Burnet. Both Dr. Arbuthnot and Sir Hans Sloane, we may remark in passing, have given evidence in favour of the purer living. His own diet he thus describes in his _Author’s Case_, written towards the end of his life:--
“My regimen, at present, is milk, with tea, coffee, bread and butter, mild cheese, salads, fruits and seeds of all kinds, with tender roots (as potatoes, turnips, carrots), and, in short, _everything that has not life_, dressed or not, as I like it, _in which there is as much or a greater variety than in animal foods_, so that the stomach need never be cloyed. I drink no wine nor any fermented liquors, and am rarely dry, most of my food being liquid, moist, or juicy.[141] Only after dinner I drink either coffee or green tea, but seldom both in the same day, and sometimes a glass of soft, small cider. The thinner my diet, the easier, more cheerful and lightsome I find myself; my sleep is also the sounder, though perhaps somewhat shorter than formerly under my full animal diet; but then I am more alive than ever I was. As soon as I wake I get up. I rise commonly at six, and go to bed at ten.”
As for the effect of this regimen, he tells us that “since that time [his last lapse] I thank God I have gone on in one constant tenor of diet, and enjoy as good health as, at my time of life (being now sixty), I or any man can reasonably expect.” When we remember the complicity of maladies of which he had been the victim during his adhesion to the orthodox mode of living, such experience is sufficiently significant. Some ten years later he records his experiences as follows:--