The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness is a 1683 book by the English merchant and writer Thomas Tryon. It concerns temperance, diet, hygiene, health, food, drink, exercise, and the treatment of animals. The work is discussed in histories of vegetarianism and animal rights.
Contents
Background and publication
Thomas Tryon (1634–1703) was an English merchant, writer, and religious thinker associated with early modern vegetarianism. Born in Bibury, Gloucestershire, he worked in wool-spinning and as a shepherd before moving to London, where he was apprenticed to a hatter and later became successful in the hat trade. According to Howard Williams, Tryon adopted a vegetarian diet at the age of 23 and later wrote on diet, temperance, health, and moral reform.
The University of Geneva's Vegan Literary Studies project describes Tryon as an author of conduct and advice manuals on temperance, health and nutrition, veganism, animal rights, the abolition of slavery, and environmentalism. It also notes that many of his works were published by the Quaker publisher Andrew Sowle.
The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness was published in London in 1683 by Sowle, under the name Philotheos Physiologue. Its title page describes it as a "discourse of temperance" on "all sorts of meats, drinks, air, exercise, &c.", with instructions on their use for "the best advantage of the body and mind".
Contents
The book gives rules and observations on food, drink, bodily health, and moral conduct. In The Ethics of Diet (1883), Williams described it as one of Tryon's dietetic works and quoted passages in which Tryon argued that herbs, fruits, grains, bread, milk preparations, pulses, and oils supplied better nourishment than flesh.
Tryon argued against the killing of animals for food. In a chapter titled "Of Flesh and its Operation on the Body and the Mind", he associated slaughter and flesh-eating with human violence and moral corruption. Williams also noted an appended dialogue between an East Indian Brahmin and a French gentleman, in which Tryon linked the "iniquities and barbarism of the Shambles" with war, including religious war.
Tryon's discussion of animals included a defence of sheep as moral examples. He presented sheep as unusually meek and peaceable creatures, and argued that their diet, social behaviour, and harmlessness showed the possibility of a more innocent way of life. In sections such as "The Sheep's Complaint", he used imagined animal speech to criticise human cruelty, including poor husbandry, slaughter, and the treatment of working and domestic animals.
Reception and influence
Benjamin Franklin later wrote in his Autobiography that, at about the age of 16, he read "a book written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet" and adopted the diet for a time. Larry Kaiser, writing for the Vegetarian Resource Group, identifies the book as probably Tryon's Wisdom's Dictates (1691), a digest of The Way to Health. According to Kaiser, Franklin regarded vegetarianism as having ethical and practical grounds, and wrote that the diet saved money and left him more time for study during his apprenticeship. Avery Yale Kamila et al. state that Franklin was influenced by The Way to Health and adopted a vegetable diet for ethical reasons and economy.
Williams described Tryon as one of the better-known seventeenth-century "humane Hygeists" and listed The Way to Health, Long Life, &c. among his works on diet. The book was reprinted in later seventeenth-century editions.
Charles R. Magel describes the book as "perhaps the first publication in English language using the term 'rights' in regard to animals". Magel cites passages in which Tryon refers to the "rights and privileges of the inferiour creatures", and to sections titled "The Complaint of the Cows", "The Sheep's Complaint", and "The Horses' Complaint".