1887 Martin Luther Holbrook, Vegetarian and Health Reformer, Autograph Manuscript Quotation Signed.

This 1887 Manuscript ponders the question “What is Wisdom?”

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Martin Luther Holbrook (1831-1902) was a 19th century medical doctor, a health reformer, and follower of the vegetarian creed. He authored, and published under his own name, a number of medical books. These titles give but a small sample of Holbrook’s ample output:  Parturition without pain; a code of directions for escaping from the primal curse (1871); Dr. Holbrook’s American Cookery (1881); Homo-culture; or, The improvement of offspring through wiser generation (1899); Hygiene of the Brain and Nerves And the Cure of Nervousness ... (1878) and so forth.

This 1887 AMQS has Holbrook pondering the question: “What is Wisdom?” This reformer’s answer is to “....go along the lines which Nature has worked out” and he invokes and quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emerson’s famous words of “hitching your load to a star”.  For Holbrook, those who accept the natural forces of Nature are helping themselves by allowing themselves to be helped, naturally.  Holbrook concludes “To seek wisdom then is to to see to use wisely nature’s forces.”

Holbrook was an important proponent of American vegetarianism and warned of the unhealthy “flesh-eaters”. For Holbrook, see Iacobbo and Iacobbo, Vegetarian America: A History (2004).

Price: $75.00