I tell you honestly what I think is the cause of the complicated maladies of the human race: it is their gormandizing and stuffing, and stimulating their digestive organs to an excess, thereby producing nervous disorders and irritation. – John Abernethy (1764–1831)

We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. – Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), 1889

The time indeed is at hand when systematic lectures on food will be part of medical education, when the value of feeding in disease is admitted to be as important as the administration of medicines. – John Milner Fothergill