The Way to HEALTH, LONG Life and Happiness;
Or,A Discourse of TEMPERANCE, And the Particular Nature of all Things requisite for the Life of Man; As, All sorts of Meats, Drinks, Air, Exercise, &c. with special Directions how to use each of them to the best Advantage of the BODY and MIND. Shewing form the ground of Nature, Treatise of most sorts of ENGLISH HERBS, With several other remarkable and most useful Observa-tions, very necessary for all Families. The whole Trea-tise displaying the most hidden secrets of Philosophy, and made easie and familiar to the meanest Capacities, by various Examples and Demonstrances.The like never before Published. Communicated to the World for a general Good, By THOMAS TRYON, Student in PHYSICK. The Second Edition, with Amendments. LONDON; Printed by H.C. for R. Baldwin, near the Ox-ford-Arms in Warwick-Lane, 1691.
8vo. Title Page. 4pp To the Reader. 8pp The Contents. 1-500. [2] 1-18. Pages lightly age browned though-out. Contemporary dark brown calf boards with nice patina. Spine relaid in sympathetic dark brown calf with blind tooled lines with a dark brown label with gilt lettering. Overall a nice copy of a rare item.
- Thomas Tryon (1634-1703) English humanitarian: Born in the bucolic village of Bibury, Gloucestershire. At the age of 18 he left Bibury without telling his parents and travelled on foot to London with £3 savings, where he became a hatter, and also in his youth, a spinner and a shepherd. He had no formal education but taught himself to read and write. He eventually went on to write many books on vegetarianism, health, wealth, slavery, education, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco also advocating animal rights. He lived a very ascetic life even though married, eventually becoming a prosperous merchant. 'The Way to Health' became his best known book and after publication he toured and lectured on it in the United States. The book much impressed Benjamin Franklin, who followed some of its tenets and often quoted from. He had a horror of war, and was shocked by the cruelty of slavery which he saw at first hand when he travelled to Barbados. In the last two decades of his life he published 27 works on a wide range of subjects. His dietary ideas were largely plagiarised by Joseph Ritson in his Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, published in 1802. Playwright Aphra Behn, and Percy Bysshe Shelley were also advocates of Tyron's writings. A supplement to this book called 'The Good Houswife Made A Doctor' (item 10945 on this site) was published after the publication of the first edition of 1683. Cagle 1028; MacLean pp.142/3; Oxford, p.43 (in a note); see Wing T3181.
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Antiquarian category
ref number:
10963