This is the foundational premise of Grahamism: that the nervous system has a natural, low level of activity suited to plain food and quiet living, and that anything which stimulates it beyond that level, meat, spices, alcohol, coffee, tea, tobacco, or sexual excess, produces disease by a kind of nervous overload (Whorton 2001). Graham first reached a mass audience by applying this premise to the 1832 cholera epidemic in New York City, lecturing that temperance and a vegetable diet were the real defense against the disease (Shryock 1931). It is classified as mechanism_only: no clinical trial or controlled comparison was offered, only a posited physiological chain from stimulation to nervous overload to disease. It is recorded as refuted rather than merely untested because the underlying theory did not survive contact with later medicine; cholera itself was subsequently traced to a waterborne pathogen unrelated to dietary stimulation, and the broader “excitability” framework for disease causation was abandoned by mainstream medicine.