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Passage Illustrated: The New Milk Cure

Mr. Lambkin's confidence in the curative powers of Hydropathy being very much damped, and being himself quite soaked through, in fact almost washed away, he takes to the good old-fashioned practice of walking early in the morning, and drinking "New Milk from the Cow." [page 37]

Commentary: Urbanite looking uncomfortable in a cowbarn

Kunzle notes how this particular frame in the Cruikshank cartoon sequence connects the progress of the middle-aged English bourgeois and his continental counterpart in the Töpffer series:

The most original episodes are placed towards the end (17-21. . . ) when Mr. Lambkin undertakes to cure his general debilitation by means of various remedies, one of which (21...) gives us perhaps the only genuinely comic and novel scene in the whole sequence. The sight of the big-city trencherman sitting forlorn in a cowshed sipping "New Milk from the Cow" . . . lies on an imaginative level one would wish to have seen maintained elsewhere. (A resemblance here with Topffer's Vieux-Bois/Oldbuck may be entirely fortuitous: as a remedy for his sickness, Oldbuck drinks ass's milk and, like Lambkin, takes exercise on horseback.) [Kunzle, page 180]

Trying every restorative regimen and cure then in vogue to address his debilitation, Lambkin obviously feels that Hydropathy has not worked. He now turns to another fad, drinking new milk, and takes up early morning walks. Lambkin's lack of animation, glum expression, and thick comforter reinforce the melancholy mood of this eleventh plate, there being two complementary illustrations to each of the twelve plates. In this left-hand image, the dour, subdued Lambkin, neck securely wrapped in a wollen scarf, is waiting to take his restorative draft of fresh milk, a scene which prepares the reader for the shift in the hero's fortunes. In the complementary image (facing page), in a moment of profound introspection while visiting his club, he notices a solitary, elderly member, reading the newspapers to pass the day away — and sees his future self in that aged, shrunken member.

The transitional scene from Lambkin's trying folk and fad cures for his general debilitation to the introspective scene in London's Grand Mausoloeum Club (undoubtedly somewhere in the vicinity of Pall Mall or St. James's) shows Lambkin waiting for the miraculous draft of raw milk. Cruikshank in this rural scene juxtaposes the caricature of the decidedly out-of-sorts hero with that of the curious, healthily plump farm-boy in the broad-brimmed straw-hat and shorts. Other elements, including the farm-wife, the milkmaid, the cow and the interior of the cow-barn, are highly realistic and quite satisfying. The middle-class farm-wife (left) watches the operation, and presumably prepares to extract the fee from the disconsolate urbanite.

The New Milk​Miracle Cure: Before Probiotics

In The Untold Story of Milk, naturopath Ron Schmid describes the miracle cure of drinking fresh milk, another fad cure of early nineteenth-century Britain that became popular in early twentieth-century America:

According to late 19th century proponents, the 'secret' of the milk cure lies in the fact good raw milk is a food the body easily turns into good blood. In illness there is one or both of two conditions in the blood: insufficient quantity, or abnormal quality. The milk diet corrects both and, acting through the blood and the circulation, heals the cells and thus the tissues and organs. The muscles on a milk diet harden, almost like an athlete's, because they are pumped full of blood, as are the organs. [Schmid, page 2]

The belief in the sovereign restorative power of freshly-drawn milk may be related to the cult of the peasant diet in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century England. In the poorer and more remote regions of the British Isles the peasant culture provided abundant locally produced cheap foodstuffs such as potatoes, vegetables, whole grains, milk and fish. By coincidence, these regions enjoyed the lowest mortality rates, with fewer deaths from pulmonary tuberculosis; in other words, despite peasant poverty, the denizens of those regions enjoyed better health because of better nutrition. The rural diet was enhanced by the practice of payment in kind rather than money; however, as the English Romantics such as William Wordsworth were well aware, these rural societies were rapidly disappearing under the combined pressures of urbanisation, commercial farming, and emigration.

Another factor that led to the belief that fresh milk was a sovereign cure was the low mortality rate among milkmaids who had suffered from cowpox and appeared resistant to smallpox, one of the great scourges of Europe. In the late eighteenth century Edward Jenner, a Gloucestershire physician, championed the practice of vaccinating with cowpox in order to prevent smallpox, a related virus. When Cruikshank was drawing the illustrations for Mr. Lambkin the British Parliament had just passed the Vaccine Act (1840), which subsequently led to a sharp decline in cases of smallpox.

References

Cruikshank, George. The Bachelor’s Own Book; Or, The Progress Of Mr. Lambkin, In The Pursuit Of Pleasure And Amusement. Glasgow: David Bryce, 1844, rpt. 1880.

Kunzle, David. "Mr. Lambkin: Cruikshank's Strike for Independence." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. P., 1974. Pp. 169-188.

Schmid, Ron, and Sally Fallon Morell. The Untold Story of Milk, Revised and Updated: The History, Politics and Science of Nature's Perfect Food: Raw Milk from Pasture-Fed Cows. New Trends Publishing, 2009.

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Last modified 26 May 2018