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From The Ethics of Diet by Howard Williams, 1883:
One of the most distinguished of the hygeistic and scientific promoters of the reformed regimen, Dr. Lambe, occupies an eminent position in the medical literature of vegetarianism, and he divides with his predecessor, Dr. Cheyne, the honour of being the founder of scientific dietetics in this country.
His family had been settled some two hundred years in the county of Hereford, in which they possessed an estate that descended to Dr. William Lambe, and is now [1883] held by his grandson. He early gave promise of his future mental eminence. Head boy of Hereford Grammar School, he proceeded, in due course, to St. John's College, Cambridge. In 1786, being then in the twenty-first year of his age, he graduated as fourth wrangler of his year. As a matter of course he was elected a Fellow of his college, where he continued to reside until his marriage in 1794. During this period of learned leisure he devoted his time to the study of medicine, and the MS. notes in the possession of his biographer, Mr. Hare, "prove the diligence with which he studied his profession, and there we see the origin of his enlarged views of the causes of disease, so much insisted on by these fathers of medicine, and so much neglected by modern physicians in their search for chemical remedies." After his marriage he went to reside and practice in Warwick, where he was the intimate friend of Parr, the well-known Greek critic, and of Walter Savage Landor, who writes of him as "very communicative and good humoured. I had enough talk with Lambe to assure myself that he is no ordinary man." It was to the discoveries of Dr. Lambe, and his publications reporting the curative value of its mineral waters, that Leamington owed its fame and popularity. . .
Like many other members from orthodox dietetics both before and after him, Dr. Lambe found himself impelled to experiment in the non-flesh diet by ill-health. His bodily disorders, indeed, were so complicated and of such a nature, as to excite astonishment that not only he greatly mitigated their violence, but that he also survived to an advanced age. . . his Additional Reports (writing in the third person), he informs us: "He resolved, therefore to finally execute what he had been contemplating for some time - to abandon animal food altogether, and everything analogous to it, and to confine himself wholly to vegetable food. This determination he put into execution the second week of February, 1806, and he has adhered to it with perfect regularity to the present time [written 1814].
In 1805, at the age of forty, we find him established in practice in London. Five years later he was physician to the General Dispensary, Aldersgate Street. He was also elected Fellow and Censor of the College of Physicians, whose meetings he regularly attended. His peculiar opinions did not tend to secure popularity for him, . . .
Not the least interesting fact in his life is his share in the conversion of Shelley, and his friendship with J. F. Newton and his interesting family, at whose house these earlier pioneers of the New Reformation were accustomed to meet, and celebrate their charming réunions with vegetarian feasts.
Amongst the most interesting correspondence of his later years is his interchange of ideas with Sylvester Graham - the first of the American prophets of the reformed regimen. The letter to the celebrated American vegetarian is, as Dr. Lambe's latest biographer justly observes, " a most valuable relic, because it continues the result of Dr. Lambe's diet up to September 1837. . .
For the connections between Lambe, Shelley J.F.Newton etc see Family Tree
From The Vegetable Passion, by Janet Barkas, 1975:
In 1809. . . the publication of Dr. William Lambe's report on the Effects of a Peculiar Regimen in Scirrhous Tumours and Cancerous Ulcers. His "peculiar regimen" consisted of a meatless diet, with a liberal use of distilled water. "We may conclude," Lambe wrote in his influential paper, "that it is the prosperity of this regimen, and in particular, of the vegetable diet, to transfer diseased action from the viscera to the exterior parts of the body - from the central parts of the system to the periphery. . . " Lambe listed the various ailments that may be eliminated by adopting a vegetarian diet - brain disease was just one of them.
From 'Vegetarian America - a history' by Karen and Michael Iacobbo, 2004:
Shelley [Percy Byshhe 1792-1822] . . . was influenced . . . by a friend, Dr. William Lambe, author of The Doctor's Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and Brutes. On the Crime of Committing Cruelty on Brutes, and of Sacrificing Them to the Purposes of Man, etc.
[re: William Andrus Alcott (1798-1859) author of The Vegetable Diet As Sanctioned by Medical Men and By Experience in All Ages.] - Alcott presented . . . evidence of the benefits of the diet from renowned physicians and scientists of his time and of the past, such as George Cheyne, William Lambe, Professor Lawrence, and Baron Cuvier.
While at Alcott House [1842]. . . With William Lambe, M.D., and surgeon J. N. Sherman, [A. Bronson] Alcott
formed a vegetarian society named the Physiological and Health Association [presumably short lived as we have no other record of this]. . .
Lambe was a renowned physician in the UK and across the Atlantic in America. A letter he wrote in defense of vegetarianism, published in The Lancet, was also published in The Bulletin of Medical Science, a Philadelphia based periodical edited by John Bell, M.D.
The doctor wrote: "I apprehend it to be impossible for you not to know that the experience of all ages has proved that a healthy man can be perfectly nourished without using a particle of animal food. I will fearlessly assert, from long experience, that vegetable food is much more salubrious than mixed diet in common use, in which, however, animal matter commonly enters in the smallest proportion. Numerous instances may be cited of persons who have lived for years in very good health without animal food ..." - William Lambe, "On the Possibility of Supporting Life on a Vegetable Diet," The Bulletin of Medical Science 11 (October 1844): 339.
Englishman Lambe explained that since 1804 (sic) he had been a vegetarian - "induced to this by severe bodily suffering." Lambe, who was in his late 80s (sic) when he wrote to The Lancet, stated that he had been healthy the past 38 years due to his vegetable diet.
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