Among the foremost activists opposing the drug therapists and offering another option was New York City's own Russell Trall, M.D., who was also a leading advocate of vegetarianism. Most who denounced medical mayhem and instead employed holistic, drugless, natural medicine were convinced that flesh foods had no place on the menu. (Anyone for bringing back the term "flesh foods"?)

In 1852, Trall founded the New York Hygieo-Therapeutic College, the first medical school to admit women on equal terms with men. Trall was influenced by Sylvester Graham and Isaac Jennings, M.D., who taught that the body is governed by natural laws originating from God and verified by observation.

Trall contended that when these laws were broken, sickness and death could result. A frugivorous diet--as mandated in Genesis and verified as natural for human beings by 19th-century studies of human anatomy--was one of the laws. When illness developed, rather than suppressing symptoms the drugless doctors sought to remove the causes. Once the causes were removed, the body tended to heal itself. Trall maintained that drugs harmed the body; they did not act upon the body but the body acted upon the drugs. For example, a laxative drug seemed to work only because the body rejected it. The drug itself did not cause the bowels to work.

Trained as an allopath, Trall had observed patients who had become well without drug intervention and those who had been made sicker by drugs. He noticed how the body was helped when patients were prescribed rest, "vegetable diets," treatments such as massage and hydrotherapy (the "water cure"), and direction to fill the mind with higher thoughts.

Trall was a sought-after doctor who even lectured at the Smithsonian Institution during the Civil War on behalf of soldiers. The doctor published more than a dozen books, which found an audience hungry to help themselves and to avoid the horrors and the sometimes fatal results of the regular doctors' medicine.

Hygieo-therapeutic Dr. Trall told his students that his practice was not lucrative, and the only reason they should become physicians was that they wanted to help the sick and teach them how to avoid sickness in the future.

Trall's views about medicine led to his vegetarianism and a vice presidency of the American Vegetarian Society. Like other vegetarians of his time, he abhorred cruelty to animals. In the 20th century, Herbert Shelton studied and then expanded Trall's work, which is today known as natural hygiene. Yet more than 100 years after Trall's death, and after billions of tax-payer dollars have been spent on health care, the nation has yet to examine the drugless doctor's ideas seriously.

He was an influential promoter of vegetarianism and was Vice-President of the American Vegetarian Society.[10] Trall's The Hygeian Home Cook-Book published in 1874 is the first known vegan cookbook in America.[11] The book contains recipes "without the employment of milk, sugar, salt, yeast, acids, alkalies, grease, or condiments of any kind."[11] Trall opposed the consumption of alcohol, coffee, meat, tea and the use of salt, sugar, pepper and vinegar.[7] He believed that spices were dangerous to health.[7]

In 1910, physician David Allyn Gorton noted that Trall's diet was "most simple and abstemious, consisting chiefly of Graham bread, hard Graham crackers, fruits, and nuts—two meals a day, without salt."[12]

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010747022

Fruits and farinacea the proper food of man :
being an attempt to prove, from history, anatomy, physiology, and chemistry, that the original, natural, and best diet of man is derived from the vegetable kingdom /
by John Smith, with notes and illustrations by R.T. Trall, M.D