Just before Christmas in 1741, the famed physician George Cheyne replied to a letter from Samuel Richardson, who had published the first edition of his groundbreaking epistolary novel Pamela the year before. This tale, like Richardson’s later novel Clarissa, is preoccupied with conduct and its consequences; most notably the conduct of young women. As suggested by the books’ full titles – Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded and Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady – it is the heroine’s status as a “lady” that determines her destiny.
Richardson, however, had written to Cheyne about his own conduct – his diet. Cheyne’s book, The English Malady, published in 1733, was one of the most influential texts of the Georgian age, dealing with what we would now call psychiatric disorders. Cheyne was one of the first celebrity physicians.
He was an early advocate of vegetarianism and was passionate in his belief that firm control of one’s eating could cure pretty much whatever ailed you. “I am sorry to find you so perplexed and puzzled about a thing of no manner of consequence,” he wrote to Richardson. “If you enter upon a vegetable diet, will you not live lighter than 9 parts of 10 of most of the people of Great Britain? If the regimen be proper it cannot be entered upon too soon or followed too strictly.
” Yet then, as now, an attempt rigidly to control diet is often of great consequence for those who undertake it, and the source not just of perplexity and puzzlem.