Cambridge-educated William Lambe (1765-1847) succeeded to the medical practice of Dr. Landor (father of the poet) in 1790, publishing in that year the first of several chemical analyses of local water sources. Among his patients were John Keats; it was at Lambe's recommendation that the ill poet would settle in warm Italy for his last year of life. Considered an eccentric by his contemporaries, he insisted on the drinking of purified water and contributed "the first serious scientific effort to demonstrate that a vegetable diet was not necessarily debilitating… Lambe had long been suffering from a variety of chronic diseases when he decided, in 1806, to investigate what would happen to his health if he temporarily abandoned the use of animal food. The results of the experiment were so encouraging he decided to continue it on a permanent basis. Writing of his experience in the third person, Lambe later reported that 'he never found the smallest real ill-consequences from this change… nor has the stomach suffered from any vegetable matter, though unchanged by any culinary art or uncorrected by condiments.' After trying the same diet on several of his patients, Lambe published the results of his experiment as Additional Reports on the Effects of a Peculiar Regimen, in Cases of Cancer, Scrofula, Consumption, Asthma, and other Chronic Diseases in 1815. This book contained… an empirical demonstration that vegetable diet provided enough energy and nutriment to sustain human life, and that… it was wholly beneficial in cases of certain chronic complaints. Nowhere in the Additional Reports did Lambe recommend a vegetable diet to persons in good health. The book was not, in other words, a tract for vegetarianism. Nevertheless, by purporting to refute the single most convincing physiological argument against vegetarianism, it provided a firm position for those who might care to produce such a tract" (Nissenbaum p.46). The most significant of such works was John Frank Newton's Return to Nature, dedicated to Lambe and allegedly the book that converted Shelley to the vegetable diet. By the 1830s, Lambe had become a true champion of vegetarianism and even carried on a correspondence with Sylvester Graham. [Biography by William Dailey.]