Dennis D. Martin wrote:
> > > Make that "murderers of their sick." This is in reference to the
> > > Carthusian practice of not providing flesh even to those monks ill and
> > > _in extremis_.
[...]
>
> No comparison. A stock part of the Carthusian defense against the
> accusation that by abstaining from meat under all circumstances they were
> murdering themselves is that the empirical data showed that they lived
> longer and healthier lives.
Hmmm.
We know (well, probably) that a non-meat diet is healthier. But did the
Carthusians?
To prove that your average Carthusian lived longer than your average
Benedictine would surely require the kind of statistical mind that simply
wasn't there in the Middle Ages. (After all, think how much you'd have to
spend on ink and parchment if you simply wanted to keep the records, let
alone do the analysis.)
Are there any surviving Carthusian documents that make this defence? (I'm
not doubting that the defence is valid - I'm simply wondering how (if at all)
this conclusion was originally reached.)
Alasdair
P.S. There's probably a really bad joke to be made about statistics,
the Poisson distribution and Christian symbolism, but I'm not about
to make it...
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|