Sylvester Graham's lectures on the science of human life / condensed for the avantage of the general reader by T. Baker.

  • Sylvester Graham
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sylvester Graham's lectures on the science of human life / condensed for the avantage of the general reader by T. Baker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    MEMOIR. The author’s father, the Rev. John Graham, graduate of Oxford (a collateral of the ducal house of Montrose), emigrated to Boston, U.S., in 1718. He must have been upwards of ninety years old when his seventeenth child, Sylvester, was born at Suffield, Con- necticut, in 1794. Naturally delicate and sickly, the boy’s life was preserved only by being early allowed to run wild among farmers. At twelve he went to school. He was handsome, clever, and imaginative. “ I had heard of noble deeds, and longed to follow to the field of fame.” Ill health soon obliged his return to the country, and at sixteen symptoms of consumption appeared. Various occupations were tried, amongst which his education was picked up, until the time, when about twenty years of age, he commenced as a teacher of youth, proving highly successful with bis pupils. Again ill health obliged the abandonment of this pursuit. In 1823 he resolved to study for the ministry at Amherst, and excelled as an elocutionist. He married in 1826, and soon after took up the temperance cause, which led him, amid frequent nervous attacks, to study with all his natural ardour, anatomy and physiology, becoming conspicuous in 1832 in his efforts to teach persons how to avoid the cholera which raged at that time. To the adoption of simple habits he ascribed his ability to carry his enfeebled constitution through the arduous labours he imposed on himself as a lecturer for the public good, but under which he at length broke down. He died on the 6th September, 1851, at Northampton, Massachusetts, aged fifty-eight.—See Life and Character of Sylvester Graham, by F. Towgood.
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