  AFTER the extinction of Greek and Latin philosophy in the fifth century, a mental torpor seized upon and, during some thousand years, with rare exceptions, dominated the whole Western world. When this torpor was dispelled by the influence of returning knowledge and Of all dietary reformers who have treated the subject from an exclusively sanitarian point of view, the most widely known and most popular name, perhaps, has been that of Luigi Cornaro; and it is as a vehement protester against the follies, rather than against the barbarism, of the prevailing dietetic habits that he claims a place in this work. He belonged to one of the leading families of Venice, then at the height of its political power. Even in an age and in a city noted for luxuriousness and grossness of living of the rich and dominant classes, he had in his youth distinguished himself by his licentious habits in eating and drinking, as well as by other excesses. His constitution had been so impaired, and he had brought upon himself so many disorders by this course of living, that existence became a burden to him. He informs us that from his thirty-fifth to his fortieth year he passed his nights and days in continuous suffering. Every sort of known remedy was exhausted before his new medical adviser, superior to the prejudices of his profession and of the public, had the courage and the good sense to prescribe a total change of diet. At first Cornaro found his enforced regimen almost intolerable, and, as he tells us, he occasionally relapsed. These relapses brought back his old sufferings, and, to save his life, he was driven at length to practise entire and uniform abstinence, the yolk of an egg often furnishing him the whole of his meal. In this way he assures us that he came to relish dry bread more than formerly he “It is very certain,” he begins, “that Custom, with time, becomes a second nature, forcing men to use that, whether good or bad, to which they have been habituated; and we see custom or habit get the better of reason in many things.... Though all are agreed that intemperance (la crapula) is the offspring of gluttony, and sober living of abstemiousness, the former nevertheless is considered a virtue and a mark of distinction, and the latter as dishonourable and the badge of avarice. Such mistaken notions are entirely owing to the power of Custom, established by our senses and irregular appetites. These have blinded and besotted men to such a degree that, leaving the paths of virtue, they have followed those of vice, which lead them imperceptibly to an old age burdened with strange and mortal diseases.... “O wretched and unhappy Italy! [thus he apostrophises his own country] can you not see that gluttony murders every year more of your inhabitants than you could lose by the most cruel plague or by fire and sword in many battles? Those truly shameful feasts (i tuoi veramente disonesti banchetti), now so much in fashion and so intolerably profuse that no tables are large enough to hold the infinite number of the dishes—those feasts, I say, are so many battles. “Nothing more is requisite for this purpose than to live up to the simplicity, dictated by nature, which teaches us to be content with little, to pursue the practice of holy abstemiousness and divine reason, and accustom ourselves to eat no more than is absolutely necessary to support life; considering that what exceeds this is disease and death, and done merely to give the palate a satisfaction which, though but momentary, brings on the body a long and lasting train of disagreeable diseases, and at length kills it along with the soul. How many friends of mine—men of the finest understanding and most amiable disposition—have I seen carried off by this plague in the flower of their youth! who, were they now living, would be an ornament to the public, and whose company I should enjoy with as much pleasure as I am now deprived of it with concern.” He tells us that he had undertaken his arduous task of proselytising with the more anxiety and zeal that he had been encouraged to it by many of his friends, men of “the finest intellect” (di bellissimo intelletto), who lamented the premature deaths of parents and relatives, and who observed so manifest a proof of the advantages of abstinence in the robust and vigorous frame of the dietetic missionary at the age of eighty. Cornaro was a thorough-going hygeist, and he followed a reformed diet in the widest meaning of the term, attending to the various requirements of a healthy condition of mind and body:— “I likewise,” he says with much candour, “did all that lay in my power to avoid those evils which we do not find it so easy to remove—melancholy, hatred, and other violent passions which appear to have the greatest influence over our bodies. However, I have not been able to guard so well against either one or the other kind of these disorders [passions] as not to suffer myself now and then to be hurried away by many, not to say all, of them; but I reaped one great benefit from my weakness—that of knowing by experience that these passions have, in the main, no great influence over bodies governed by the two foregoing rules of eating and drinking, and therefore can do them but very little harm, so that it may, with great truth, be affirmed that whoever observes these two capital rules is liable to very little inconvenience from any other excess. This Galen, who was an eminent physician, observed before me. He affirms that so long as he followed these two rules relative to eating and drinking (perchÈ si guardava da quelli due della bocca) he suffered but little from other disorders—so little that they never gave him above a day’s uneasiness. That what he says is true I am a living witness; and so are many others who know me, and have seen how often I have been exposed to heats and colds and such other disagreeable changes of weather, and have likewise seen me (owing to various misfortunes which have more than once befallen me) greatly disturbed in mind. For not only can they say of me that such mental disturbance has affected me little, but they can aver of many others who did not lead a frugal and regular life that such failure proved very prejudicial to them, among whom was a brother of my own and others of my family who, trusting to the goodness of their constitution, did not follow my way of living.” At the age of seventy a serious accident befel him, which to the vast majority of men so far advanced in life would probably have been fatal. His coach was overturned, and he was dragged a considerable distance along the road before the horses could be stopped. He was taken up insensible, covered with severe wounds and bruises and with an arm and leg dislocated, and altogether he was in so dangerous a state that his physicians gave him only three days to live. As a matter of course they prescribed bleeding and purging as the only proper and effectual remedies:— “But I, on the contrary, who knew that the sober life I had led for many years past had so well united, harmonised, and dispersed my humours as not to leave it in their power to ferment to such a degree [as to induce the expected high fever], refused to be either bled or purged. I simply caused my leg and arm to be set, and suffered myself to be rubbed with some oils, which they said were proper on the occasion. Thus, without using any other kind of remedy, I recovered, as I thought I should, without feeling the least alteration in myself or any other bad effects from the accident, a thing which appeared no less than miraculous in the eyes of the physicians.” It is, perhaps, hardly to be expected that “The Faculty” will endorse the opinions of Cornaro, that any person by attending strictly to his regimen “could never be sick again, as it removes every cause of illness; and so, for the future, would never want either physician or physic”:— “Nay, by attending duly to what I have said he would become his own physician, and, indeed, the best he could have, since, in fact, no man can be a perfect physician to anyone but himself. The reason of which is that any man may, by repeated trials, acquire a perfect knowledge of his own constitution and the most hidden qualities of his body, and what food best agrees with his stomach. Now, it is so far from being an easy matter to know these things perfectly of another that we cannot, without much trouble, discover them in ourselves, since a great deal of time and repeated trials are required for that purpose.” Cornaro’s second publication appeared three years later than his first, under the title of A Compendium of a Sober Life and the third, An Earnest Exhortation to a Sober and Regular Life, “Some allege that many, without leading such a life, have lived to a hundred, and that in constant health, although they ate a great deal and used indiscriminately every kind of viands and wine, and therefore flatter themselves that they shall be equally fortunate. But in this they are guilty of two mistakes. The first is, that it is not one in one hundred thousand that ever attains that happiness; the other mistake is, that such persons, in the end, most assuredly contract some illness which carries them off, nor can they ever be sure of ending their days otherwise, so that the safest way to obtain a long and healthy life is, at least after forty, to embrace abstinence. This is no difficult matter, since history informs us of very many who, in former times, lived with the greatest temperance, and I know that the present Age furnishes us with many such instances, reckoning myself one of the number. Now let us remember that we are human beings, and that man, being a rational animal, is himself master of his actions.” Amongst others:— “There are old gluttons (attempati) who say that it is necessary they should eat and drink a great deal to keep up their natural heat, which is constantly diminishing as they advance in years, and that it is therefore necessary for them to eat heartily and of such things as please their palates, and that were they to lead a frugal life it would be a short one. To this I answer that our kind mother, Nature, in order that old men may live to a still greater age, has contrived matters so that they should be able to subsist on little, as I do, for large quantities of food cannot be digested by old “Others say that it is better for a man to suffer every year three or four returns of his usual disorders, such as gout, sciatica, and the like than to be tormented the whole year by not indulging his appetite, and eating everything his palate likes best, since by a good regimen alone he is sure to get the better of such attacks. To this I answer that, our natural heat growing less and less as we advance in years, no regimen can retain virtue enough to conquer the malignity with which disorders of repletion are ever attended, so that he must die at last of these periodical disorders, because they abridge life as health prolongs it. Others pretend that it is much better to live ten years less than not indulge one’s appetite. My reply is that longevity ought to be highly valued by men of genius and intellect; as to others it is of no great matter if it is not duly prized by them, since it is they who brutalise the world (perchÈ questi fanno brutto il mondo), so that their death is rather of service to mankind.” Cornaro frequently interrupts his discourse with apostrophes to the genius of Temperance, in which he seems to be at a loss for words to express his feeling of gratitude and thankfulness for the marvellous change effected in his constitution, by which he had been delivered from the terrible load of sufferings of his earlier life, and by which moreover he could fully appreciate, as he had never dreamed before, the beauties and charms of nature of the external world, as well as develope the mental faculties with which he had been endowed:— “O thrice holy Sobriety, so useful to man by the services thou renderest him! Thou prolongest his days, by which means he may greatly improve his understanding. Thou moreover freest him from the dreadful thoughts of death. How greatly is thy faithful disciple indebted to thee, since by thy assistance he enjoys this beautiful expanse of the visible world, which is really beautiful to such as know how to view it with a philosophic eye, as thou hast enabled me to do!... O truly happy life which, besides these favours conferred on an old man, hast so improved and perfected him that he has now a better relish for his dry bread than he had formerly for the most exquisite dainties. And all this thou hast effected by acting rationally, knowing that bread is, above all things, man’s proper food when seasoned by a good appetite.... It is for this reason that dry bread has so much relish for me; and I know from experience, and can with truth affirm, that I find such sweetness in it that I should be afraid of sinning against temperance were it not for my being convinced of the absolute necessity of eating of it, and that we cannot make use of a more natural food.” The fourth and last of his appearances in print was a “Letter to Barbaro, Patriarch of Aquileia,” written at the age of ninety-five. It describes in a very lively manner the health, vigour, and use of all his faculties of mind and body, of which he had the perfect enjoyment. He was far advanced in life when his daughter, his only child, was born, and “But all these fine prerogatives of Luigi Cornaro would not have been sufficient to render his name famous in Europe if he had not left behind him the short treatises upon Temperance, composed at various times at the advanced ages of 85, 86, 91, and 95. The candour which breathes through their simplicity, the importance of the argument, and the fervour with which he urges upon all to study the means of prolonging our life, have obtained for them so great good fortune as to be praised to the skies by men of the best understanding. The many editions which have been published in Italy, and the translations which, together with an array of physiological and philological notes, have appeared out of Italy, at one time in Latin, at another in French, again in German, and again in English, prove their importance. These discourses, in fact, enjoyed all the reputation of a classical book, and, although occasionally somewhat unpolished, as ‘Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda,’ they have sufficed to inspire (riscaldare) a Lessio, a Bartolini, a Ramazzini, a Cheyne, a Hufeland, and so many others who have written works of greater weight upon the same subject.” Addison (Spectator 195) thus refers to him:— “The most remarkable instance of the efficacy of temperance towards the procuring long life is what we meet with in a little book published by Lewis Cornaro, the Venetian, which I the rather mention because it is of undoubted credit, as the late Venetian Ambassador, who was of the same family, attested more than once in conversation when he resided in England.... After having passed his one hundredth year he died without pain or agony, and like one who falls asleep. The treatise I mention has been taken notice of by several eminent authors, and is written with such a spirit of cheerfulness, religion, and good sense as are the natural concomitants of temperance and sobriety. The mixture of the old man in it is rather a recommendation than a discredit to it.” In fact he has exposed himself, it must be confessed, to the taunts of the “devotees of the Table” often cast at the abstinents, that they are too much given to parading their health and vigour, and certainly if any one can be justly obnoxious to them it is Luigi Cornaro. |
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