As I have written a number of health books, large numbers of people came to me for advice. Most of them suffered from diseases and disorders which had proved intractable or incurable to orthodox physicians and specialists, who unfortunately know little of diet. I placed thousands of them on a fleshless diet, but by no means all. There is a small proportion of people who do not flourish on a fleshless diet, but the proportion is very small. Probably we were not meant to eat meat. If you look into the mouth of a meat-eating animal, such as the cat or dog, you will notice that the chewing teeth are extremely sharp and edged, and that the upper and lower chewing teeth work together like scissors to cut and tear the meat. Our teeth are more like those of the vegetable-eating animals and of the apes, who live on fruit and nuts.
Most of those who wish to try vegetarianism make the mistake that they try to live on vegetables alone, accompanied, perhaps, by white bread and butter. White bread is not a food but a poison. Keep a cageful of rats on white bread and water and they will die all within a few weeks of horrible diseases. Keep another cageful on wholemeal bread and water and they will flourish and beget generation after generation. Those who try vegetarianism, living on white bread and butter, vegetables, possibly cooked with soda and potatoes peeled before boiling make a failure of it.
One of the essential items in a vegetarian diet is wholemeal bread, or wholemeal grain in some form or other. The argument that bread or grain is “too starchy” is totally mistaken. Dr. Hindhede, the celebrated food reformer of Denmark, and his assistants have lived for years exclusively on wholemeal bread and water and a little margarine and potatoes boiled in their skins. I live on the most elementary foods in the most elementary form. I take, for instance, every morning, a large portion of bran porridge, and take bran two or three times a day in puddings and cake, etc. Thousands of people whose diet I have regulated have become bran worshippers and wholemeal flour habitues.
A gentleman wrote to me from Carbis Bay that he was dying of heart disease and was given three weeks to live. He was wealthy man. He was kept in bed by doctors orders and he was so weak that his wife had to run him round in bed. I asked him to send me a full list of all he ate and drank, his prescriptions and his photo. These were sent to me. The gentleman weighed eighteen or nineteen stone, had a huge abdomen, lived on the customary mixed diet of civilization, and was given medicine to digest food, medicine to empty his bowels, medicine to make hi, sleep, medicine to empty his bowels, medicine for the nerves, etc.
He was fed and doped to death and was made stouter than ever y his diet. I put him on a strict vegetarian diet and told him the only flesh he was to have was two or three pounds of his own flesh and fat, which he was to consume every week, because the food allowed was insufficient to maintain his weight. I tool away from him his Digitalis and all his other medicines, and gave him homoeopathic medicine in infinitely small doses. Further, he was told to take every day two walks of five minutes each by the watch and to add to every walk one minute per day.
In a month he walked seventy minutes, in two months he walked more than two hours every day, his weight went down by five or six stones, and in few months he reported to me that he was going for twelve to fifteen mile walks without a stop in the Scotch hills, and covering longer distances on foot than he had ever done in his youth. He was between sixty and seventy years old. I could mention a score of similar cases of heart disease which had been declared incurable by leading Harley Street specialists.
Some years ago a lady wrote to me from Swansea that her husband had been kept four days at the local hospital for a diagnosis and that he had just been sent back to her home with the diagnosis that he had inoperable cancer involving bowel and bladder and that he had not a week to live. On hearing this terrible news she had rushed to the nearest bookshop and asked for book on cancer.
One of my own cancer books was the only one which they had in stock. She had read it all night and sent me a letter full of anguish which closed with the words “Save my husband for he is all in all to me.” I turned to my secretary and told her that of course nothing could be done. Still, I could not refuse and sent her a diet sheet. I placed her husband on a strict vegetarian diet, and to my amazement he improved promptly and greatly, and only a long time afterwards I reinforced the diet with the indicated homoeopathic medicines.
In six months time he walked about as usual, worked in his garden, had become his old self. Of course it is difficult to decide what part the diet played in his cure and in the cure of the Carbis Bay heart case, and what part was borne by the homoeopathic medicines. Being familiar with both diet and homoeopathy, I used of course, both simultaneously, for have not the heart to experiment with the sick by trying diet alone or homoeopathy alone.
However, although I have the greatest belief in the miraculous power of homoeopathy, I would not miss dietetic treatment, which I employ in every case, and the great majority of people who come to me are made vegetarians. For a time they make difficulties, but after a while they feel so much better with a fleshless diet that they have no longer any desire for flesh food.
Some years ago I was visited by a very sick unmarried lady, of about forty. She had many and serious complaints, from which she had suffered for many years. After studying her case during more than an hour I told her that I should to put her on a strict vegetarian diet. “But my father is large butcher and I have to carve every day for about twenty. Besides, I love meat and we get all the best cuts.”
Her mouth was watering while describing to me their wonderful joints. She was willing to give vegetarianism a trial. She bore with heroism the daily teasing of her father and all the others, and she improved greatly. Christmas came along and she implored me: “Let me have at least some turkey.” I gracefully relented and a few days after she told me that the turkey had terribly upset her, had proved a poison to her. She tired turkey and chicken very occasionally, always with disastrous results and now she recognizes that flesh is a poison to her, and that her chronic ill-health during many years was due to her diet.
Years ago lady from the country came to me and complained about a very intractable skin disease, from which she had suffered for many years, which had been treated by numerous specialist with powerful medicines without the slightest success. Besides, she was extremely weak and anaemic. A walk of a few minutes prostrated her. I placed her on a fleshless diet, against which she protested loudly, but in vain, and in due course her skin disease disappeared completely and she became a powerful woman, the picture of health and happiness. She also was a butchers daughter.
Those who wish to embrace vegetarianism must remember that a certain quantity of concentrated food is needed, particularly for those who do hard physical work. If I wish to induce flesh eaters to become vegetarians I explain to them that milk is liquid beef, that eggs are concentrated chicken, that cheese is far more nutritious than meat, that nuts, almonds, peas beans, lentils, etc. are foods as concentrated as meat and far less objectionable. With these foods and an ample quantity of salads, conservatively cooked vegetables, raw salading, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, etc., wholemeal bread and bran, one can produce meals fit for kings. Meat flavouring can be replaced by Marmite, prepared from yeast and is exceedingly rich in vitamin B.
Right drinking is as necessary as right eating. We must flush drains and must supply the body with a large quantity of liquid, which we give out all the time in the form of visible and invisible perspiration, in the breath, etc. too great a consumption of sugar, salt, pepper, mustard, vinegar, pickles is dangerous, for these damage liver and kidneys. I have had to explain to many a man “Your disease is not arterio-sclerosis or endocarditis, or whatever the scientific name is, but too much mustard”, or “you do not suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, or stored gout, etc., but from too much port wine and stout” and so forth.
The other morning at 8 Oclock an agricultural labourer, twenty- three years old, called on me. He lived a hundred miles from my home home, had cycled all night through on a push cycle to see me. He had been under medical treatment for eight years, and had been told that his heart, kidneys and lungs were in an extremely serious condition, and had been supplied with weekly bottles of medicine which had done him no good.
The poor fellow lived on white bread and butter, large quantities of meat and bacon, strong tea, drunk boiling hot, five of white sugar, and he smoked a great many cigarettes without a holder. He lived exclusively on foodless food, took no vegetables and salads which grew around him because he did not think them strengthening, potatoes were ruined by peeling them and he did no selected this diet, one could understand it. I gave him a natural, plain diet, whole wheat, bran, an abundance of potatoes, vegetables, salads, eggs, milk Demerara sugar, and so forth, and I feel certain that in a week or two he will a totally different man.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.