On this day in vegan history · September 6, 1634
Thomas Tryon, the Merchant Who Heard a Voice Telling Him to Stop Eating Animals
A Gloucestershire shepherd's son grew up to write the books that talked Benjamin Franklin into giving up meat.
The facts
- Born
- 6 September 1634, in Bibury, Gloucestershire, England
- The Voice of Wisdom
- In 1657, an inner voice by that name urged him to become a vegetarian and live frugally
- Key book
- The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness (1683)
- Later influence
- Read by a teenage Benjamin Franklin, who credited it with his own vegetable diet
Thomas Tryon was born on 6 September 1634 in Bibury, Gloucestershire, the son of a poor tiler and thatcher. He left home young, worked as a shepherd, then apprenticed to a hatter in London before spending years as a merchant in the Caribbean and Europe. In 1657 he said an inner voice he called the "Voice of Wisdom" urged him to give up meat, alcohol, and tobacco and live plainly. He spent the rest of his life turning that conviction into books on diet, temperance, and the treatment of animals and the enslaved, and one of his readers, a Boston teenager named Benjamin Franklin, credited those books with turning him vegetarian.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
When about 16 years of age, I happen'd to meet with a book written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet.
Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography
Source: Vegetarian Resource Group -
In 1657 he said that he heard an inner voice, which he called the "Voice of Wisdom", urging him to become a vegetarian and follow a frugal diet.
Wikipedia, on Thomas Tryon
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Tryon gave up meat for reasons of conscience over a century before the word vegetarian existed, and the fact that his books changed Benjamin Franklin's diet is one of the earliest documented chains of influence running through what became the movement.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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