Swine's Flesh by Nelson N. Titus

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 9, 1866

Swine's Flesh.

By Nelson N. Titus

BRO. WHITE: The following is taken from a work devoted to the nature and treatment of diseases of animals; but it contains some good ideas on the use of swine's flesh, which if you are pleased to publish, may be interesting to some one. The author is Nelson N. Titus. S. B. WHITNEY.

There is no one article of food that has caused more disease than pork. Dr. Nichols says that man partakes more or less of the qualities of the animal that he subsists upon; and says that "in eating pork we swallow the matter which was in process of elaboration, and was destined to become a part of the brain and nervous system of the hog; consequently we appropriate what would have been the cerebral organ of some swinish nature."

You may be sure that when matter has gone so far toward being converted into the proper essence of the hog, it is not easily turned out of its course. It seems much better to take the pure nutrition furnished us in healthy food, and do for ourselves the whole process of elaboration.

One thing is sure, when we feed on pork, we feel stupid, and partake of the sluggish stupidity of the swine.

Pork is not the food for high and pure natures, of noble purposes and earnest thought, of the highest art and profoundest science. Hog is not the aliment of intellectual developments; all men of striking intellectual development have been sparing of animal food, and more especially of pork. The hog may be a very respectable animal in his way, but he has no qualities that I am aware of, to induce me to eat the creature.

But this is not the worst feature of the case. The process of fatting a hog is a diseasing one; he is shut up in filthy pens and fed upon all the filth and refuse of the farm. A fatted hog seems to be the incarnation of laziness, gluttony and filth, and the scrofulous disease and utter depravity which these generate. A fatted hog, then, is the epitome of the evils of modern society. I think that Dr. Adam Clarke had the right view of the subject when he said, that were he to make a sacrifice to the Devil, he would offer him a fat hog stuffed with tobacco.

It is a fact well known to medical men that some hogs are a congeries of scrofulous tumors, and that a considerable portion of their lard is as much corruption as the matter of a tumor. They know all the disgusting and deathly facts of the pathology of the pork market—of ulcerated livers, diseased lungs, and the general corruption of hogs.

Scrofula—this term is derived from the Latin scrofa, a sow; because it is a disease to which swine are especially liable. So when we eat hog we eat scrofula or scrofula. But the hog advocates will say that they keep them for the profit, or as a matter of interest; but it has been ascertained by correct experiment that the corn required to make pork enough to support a man one hundred days, would if eaten in its pure, original, and far more healthy condition, afford him as much nutriment for four hundred and eighty days, to say nothing of time and trouble lost in feeding the animal. But, says one, the hog will eat that which no other animal will eat. I will admit that; and that is a good reason why we should not eat him. In fatting a hog, a certain number of bushels of good healthy corn and potatoes are converted into a mass of greasy, and in many cases, scrofulous pork, with great loss and trouble, while the flesh thus made does not contain one principle necessary to the human constitution which did not exist in a better form in the vegetable on which it fed. In short, it has been found by an accurate calculation that vegetable food is not only better, but five hundred per cent cheaper than the flesh of swine.

Some may think the author is a Jew, or that his prejudices against pork are unfounded; but it is a duty that I owe to the public as a medical man to raise a warning voice against the effect of hog-eating.