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JOUENAL OF THE EOYAL HOETICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



THE VALUE OF FKUIT AS FOOD. 

 By Dk. Josiah Oldfield. 

 [Lecture given on October 16, 1906.] 



It is, perhaps, specially fitting that your Society has selected me to read 

 before you a paper on the value of fruit as food. 



In the first place, I am a physician ; and, if there is one class of the 

 community who ought to study the problems of diet and teach them, it 

 is the medical profession. 



It is to me a matter of the profoundest regret that our medical 

 journals are filled almost wholly with papers dealing with drugs and 

 with surgery, and so little is the interest taken in the far more important 

 subject of food, that editors (who are usually led by their readers instead 

 of being guides and leaders of their clientele) always regret that they are 

 unable to find space for papers on this subject, and treat it as if it were a 

 matter of minor consideration. 



Now I am bound to maintain that since food modifies our body cells, 

 and since our body reacts on our mentality and on cur spirituality (or 

 lack of it), and is the instrument through which the inner self manifests 

 itself to its environment, there is no subject more important for the 

 physician of the body, for the teacher of the mind, and for the healer 

 of the soul, than the study of foods. This was recognised by the early 

 fathers of medicine, and by the early fathers of the Church, and by the 

 great founders of great religions : and whether it be Celsus or Hippocrates, 

 or whether it be Moses or Gautama, we find the most important place 

 assigned by them to food and feeding. 



It is only modern medicine and modern religions which have climbed 

 so high into the attics of dogmata as to neglect the fundamental base by 

 which bodily phenomena are produced. 



I feel, therefore, that it is fitting that a physician should take up his 

 parable before you and change the usual course of your lectures from 

 the subject of fruit-producing to the allied subject of fruit-eating. 



In the second place perhaps you have selected me in harmony with 

 what is fitting because I come from the garden of England — I had 

 almost said the Garden of Eden — and though I am not a Kentish man by 

 birth, yet Kent has been my home for many years, and it is in this 

 county that the premier hospital for the treatment of diseases on a fruit 

 dietary — the Lady Margaret Fruitarian Hospital, Bromley, Kent — was 

 founded by me some years ago, and where it has flourished in such a 

 marvellous way that it is known all over the world, and receives applica- 

 tions for admission of patients from so far afield as France, Italy, Austria, 

 and even Hong Kong. 



At the outset, however, I should like to make my own position clear. 



Some people imagine that I am a vegetarian, and that my opinion, 

 therefore, on the question of food is warped by a certain faddism. Now 



