Dr. Fr. Wilh. Dock (medical director of the "Untern Wald," St. Gallen), Ueber die sittliche und gesundheitliche Bedeutung des Vegetarianismus (naturgemässe Lebensweise[1]), St. Gallen, Zollikofer, 1878, p. 7:—
The name Vegetarian will probably stick to us; men do indeed laugh at it, because they understand by it only a plant-eater; but it has a very different meaning. For we derive the name from the Latin word vegetus, which signified among the Romans a man sound in body and intellect, brisk and energetic.
Our own magazine has not, I think, anywhere given the true etymology of our title. See Dietetic Reformer for 1880, pp. 27, 28:—
Mrs. Buxton speaks in one of her lectures as if she thought that Vegetarians were ignorant that milk and eggs, and cheese are animal products. . . . We are quite aware that, if we use milk and other animal products, we are not strictly what the word “Vegetarian” implies. Some of our members, we may say, are really what the name implies, but our Society itself commands[2] to its members, as a necessity, abstinence from the flesh only, but not from the products, of live animals.
On the 5th September, 1850, Mr. Jonathan Wright, of Philadelphia (Vegetarian Messenger, vol. ii p. 44), shewed some inkling of the truth.
The Vegetarian Messenger, vol. i append. p. vii, teaches in what sense a man becomes vegetus by our rule. G. E., a stonemason, wrote in February, 1850:—
"I am 41 years of age, have been a teetotaler 14 years, but have had a great deal of sickness, and have generally been suffering from some ailment or other, arising, I believe, from improper diet, even from my boy-hood. I have suffered so immensely from pills, draughts, &c., that my constitution is become quite weak." He was advised to live entirely upon fruits and farinacea. On the 3rd of June he wrote: "I get on now first-rate, being able to regulate the action of my system like clock-work, and keep in excellent health, entirely without the use of medicine of any description; and altogether I feel in a blessed state of existence. I am more buoyant in spirits—more agile. My physical energy is increased, and altogether I enjoy a new life. It was a blessed day for me when Providence first led me to see the Vegetarian tracts, simply by accident, in a shop window."
I have shewn, in reply to Sir Henry Thompson—
I. If we say nothing in our profession about milk and eggs—if we can neither endorse nor disprove by a counter statement of figures, though we gravely question, his formal statistics, "Nineteen-twentieths of Vegetarians make large use of milk
