Amílcar de Sousa

Who was Amílcar de Sousa?

Amílcar Augusto Queirós de Sousa was a Portuguese medical doctor, and author of many health books, being the most famous O Naturismo, published in 1912. A pioneer of vegetarianism in Portugal, he was the president of the first Portuguese vegetarian society, the Sociedade Vegetariana de Portugal, founded in the city of Porto, 1911, and the director of O Vegetariano, a monthly magazine on vegetarianism.

He corresponded with many well known personalities from medicine and science, such as the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, the American medical doctor John Harvey Kellogg, and the French physician Paul Carton.

He advocated a raw vegetarian diet. He was also against eggs, milk, tobacco and alcohol. He said that eating an egg was the same as ”eating a chicken embryo” and that milk was “not the food of man.”

D. M. Richardson wrote in the magazine The Healthy Life:

He was also a pacifist and frequently criticized war in his articles.

He considered Pythagoras to be the most notable philosopher of all time and wrote that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the best educator, as in Émile, or On Education, he valued education in contact with nature.