By the time he arrived in London for medical treatment in 1725, George Cheyne was in a terrible state. Headaches racked his brain, and gout blistered his legs in sores until they appeared “burnt almost like the Skin of a roasted Pig”, as he put it. Above all, there was his weight, which at times rocketed to 32 stone (203 kilograms). He was left tormented with depression – and no wonder. That he was a physician himself was bad enough, but added to that was the crowning indignity: at this very moment, Dr Cheyne was being touted from the bookstalls as the diet guru of the day.
It is the archetypal irony of medicine that George Cheyne was his own most difficult patient. By the 1720s Cheyne was a prosperous physician in the fashionable English spa town of Bath and a doctor to the stars, regularly treating Alexander Pope on the poet’s visits, and advising novelist Samuel Richardson on dieting. Like many a modern self-help writer, Cheyne had a powerful empathetic hold on the patients he addressed as “my fellow-Sufferers”. The nation’s diet doctor had, in fact, been battling his own weight for decades.
Born near Aberdeen in 1671, Cheyne moved to London and in his early years was a promising young polymath, publishing varied works on fevers, gout and calculus. London agreed with him rather too well: he befriended, in his own words, “Bottle-Companions, the younger Gentry, and Free-Livers…nothing being necessary for that Purpose, but to be able to Eat lustily, and swallow down much Liquor”. He soon found himself “fat, short-breath’d, Lethargic, and Lifeless”, and in 1705 a series of “vertiginous Paroxysms” nearly killed him. Cheyne’s drinking friends promptly fell away (“like autumnal leaves” he grumbled) and the ailing doctor embarked on vomiting purges that left him depressed and little improved.
Advertisement
He remained ill until, on the word of a fellow doctor, in the winter of 1707 he rode the dozen miles south to Croydon to seek out one Dr Taylor, a man renowned for his extraordinary diet. He found Taylor sitting down with nothing but a quart of milk. “That was all his Dinner,” marvelled Cheyne. Taylor explained that after hopeless consultations among his London colleagues over his own ill health, he had weaned himself from alcohol and then from meat, and lived solely off milk for 17 years. Cheyne left impressed. He swore off all but milk and vegetables, on the novel theory that the two were largely the same – “Milk being Vegetables immediately cook’d by Animal Heat and Organs”. Like every dieter he was prone to backsliding, and his weight eventually steadied around a still portly 136 kilos. But he felt better than he had in years. The revived doctor established a thriving practice in Bath, and eventually set about writing down his maxims for health.
“I have consulted nothing but my own Experience and Observation in my own crazy Carcase and the Infirmities of others I have treated,” he claimed in the preface to An Essay of Health and Long Life, published in 1724. It was a clear challenge to traditional medicine: uninterested in quoting from classical authors or even from his colleagues. Hard personal experience alone taught him that health depended on five crucial factors: exercise, diet, rest, purgatives and fresh air. He recommended going to bed by 10 o’clock and rising by 6, and shunning both red meat and hard liquor for milk, vegetables, poultry and a moderate intake of wine – half a chicken a day, perhaps, with a couple glasses of wine, and washed down with mineral water. For more vulnerable patients, meat was dispensed with entirely. Oily, smoked, pickled and spicy foods were also to be avoided in favour of plain portions of beans, oats, rice and potatoes. Green tea received his hearty approval but not chocolate, a drink he suspected of promoting “a false and hysterical Appetite”. Just as important was purgative vomiting and vigorous exercise.
In an age when most lived by the sweat of their brow, Cheyne was writing for an urban class of sedentary clerks and intellectuals who no longer enjoyed the rude health of the countryside. “The Studious and the Contemplative…must make Exercise a Part of their Religion,” he insisted. Cheyne championed the “chamber horse”, a chair sporting an elevated seat on what resembled an accordion bellows. Inside was a large spring, and by gripping the chair’s arms you could bounce up and down in a simulation of horse-riding. In short, Cheyne was promoting one of the very first examples of home gym equipment.
The effect of his Essay was galvanising. “It is now in almost every bodys hand,” noted one commentator. It passed through six reprints in its first year, and was translated into French, Dutch, Latin and Italian. Chamber horses became de rigueur. Even the dour Methodist theologian John Wesley spent time each day bouncing up and down on one. Cheyne recommended to Samuel Richardson that he compose his novel Pamela by dictating it while bouncing on a chamber horse, and then helpfully suggested that Pamela would be also improved by adding house fires and plenty of broken limbs to the plot.
“Even the dour John Wesley liked to bounce on a chamber horse”
If he wasn’t too adept at writing novels, Cheyne nonetheless wrote the archetypal self-help dieting and exercise best-seller. Its appeal was an empowering insistence on preventive care and home exercise, the better to stay away from doctors and spas. Colleagues began to fear the implications of Cheyne’s popularity – every case was far too individual to be left in a patient’s untutored hands, they protested – and Cheyne’s belief that a moderate diet would head off the need for many curative elixirs elicited a similar response. One member of the Royal Society anonymously mocked Cheyne as “Dr Diet”, while a pamphlet that appeared shortly after his Essay accused Cheyne of luring an unwitting public to destruction to bolster his own practice: “He puts himself upon a Level with these Savages of the Sea-coast, who set out false Lights, to invited distressed Mariners to their Destruction.”
Cheyne was unimpressed. “The Human Body is a Machin of an infinite number and Variety of different Channels and Pipes, filled with different Liquors and Fluids,” he proclaimed in 1733 in his treatise The English Malady. Cheyne believed the body was a hydraulic mechanism operating by definable laws, and he counted himself among the “Iatro-Mechanists” who sought to apply Newtonian laws to biology. By observing that “leathern tubes” did not clog or wear even after years of carrying thin and mild fluids like milk, Cheyne reasoned that most human ailments arose from a meat and alcohol-rich diet that, as he memorably described it, promoted a “glewiness” that turned veins into “a Blood Pudding”.
Even as his Essay went to press, a relapse into drinking sent Cheyne spiralling into gout and obesity almost to the point of death. Like many a dieter since, he found himself yo-yoing between health and illness. He fully confessed these difficulties by publishing his own miseries as a medical case study, and he remained humorously unrepentant to his friends. “Immortal Doctor Chenyey bids me to tell you that he shall live at least Two Centuries by being a real and practical Philosopher,” wrote a mutual friend to Alexander Pope, “while such Gluttonous Pretenders to Philosophy as You, Dr. Swift and My Lord Bolingbroke die Eating and Drinking at Fourscore”.
Sadly, Cheyne didn’t reach fourscore. He died at the age of 71, still a very respectable age for a man weighing two or three times as much as his friends. People continued to read his advice for almost a century, for his Essay was reprinted numerous times, up till 1834. And unlike most 18th-century medical advice, many of his rules still seem sensible today, though perhaps not his fondness for vomiting. Cheyne was a founding father of modern vegetarianism, and his Essay even contained an eminently chic recommendation that meat-eaters partake only of free-range animals: “All cramm’d Poultry and stall-fed Cattle…tend more to Putrefaction,” he warned.
His most poignant legacy remains the chamber horse. Several survive at London’s Science Museum, mute witnesses to generations of couch potatoes. Nearly a century later the physician Benjamin Rush was still prescribing chamber horses, and Jane Austen’s characters also resorted to them. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries estate sales regularly turned up abandoned chamber horses. Any resemblance to the dusty treadmills and exercise bicycles in our own garages is, of course, coincidental.
