Elder Loughborough’s Experience

The childhood and youth of Elder J. N. Loughborough, who died at the ripe age of ninety-two, may be cited as typical of his contemporaries. At the age of eight he peered one day through the thick blankets that curtained and covered the tall posts of the bed on which his father lay dying of typhoid fever. The sufferer had been faithfully and lovingly dosed with drugs, and then had been forbidden by his attending physician the comfort of a drink of cold water or even a refreshing breath of pure air.SHM 23.3

After his father’s death the orphaned boy was reared in the family of his grandfather, who lived on a farm. Every fall four large, fat hogs and one beef were slaughtered as winter provisions for the family. Nearly all parts of the hogs were eaten “except the bristles and the hoofs.” Of his diet at that time he related:SHM 23.4

“I was a great lover of animal flesh as food. I wanted fat pork fried for breakfast, boiled meat for dinner, cold slices of ham or beef for supper. One of my sweetest morsels was bread well soaked in pork gravy.”—The Gospel of Health, October, 1899. (Battle Creek, Michigan.)SHM 24.1

“If in the spring of the year we felt langour (really the result of consuming so much fat and flesh meats during the winter), we resorted to sharp pickles, horse-radish, mustard, pepper, and the like, to ‘sharpen the appetite’ and tone up the system. We naturally expected a ‘poor spell’ in the spring before we could get newly grown vegetables.”—The Medical Missionary, December, 1899. (Battle Creek, Michigan.)SHM 24.2