Our family renew with pleasure their recollections of your kind visit to Monticello, and join me in tendering sincere assurances of the gratification it afforded us, and of our great esteem and respectful consideration.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CXLVII.—­TO DOCTOR VINE UTLEY, March 21, 1819

TO DOCTOR VINE UTLEY.

Monticello, March 21, 1819.

Sir,

Your letter of February the 18th came to hand on the 1st instant; and the request of the history of my physical habits would have puzzled me not a little, had it not been for the model with which you accompanied it, of Doctor Rush’s answer to a similar inquiry.  I live so much like other people, that I might refer to ordinary life as the history of my own.  Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.  I double, however, the Doctor’s glass and a half of wine, and even treble it with a friend; but halve its effect by drinking the weak wines only.  The ardent wines I cannot drink, nor do I use ardent spirits in any form.  Malt liquors and cider are my table drinks, and my breakfast, like that also of my friend, is of tea and coffee.  I have been blest with organs of digestion, which accept and concoct, without ever murmuring, whatever the palate chooses to consign to them, and I have not yet lost a tooth by age.  I was a hard student until I entered on the business of life, the duties of which leave no idle time to those disposed to fulfil them; and now, retired, and at the age of seventy-six, I am again a hard student.  Indeed my fondness for reading and study revolts me from the drudgery of letter-writing.  And a stiff wrist, the consequence of an early dislocation, makes writing both slow and painful.  I am not so regular in my sleep as the Doctor says he was, devoting to it from five to eight hours, according as my company or the book I am reading interests me; and I never go to bed without an hour, or half hour’s previous reading of something moral, whereon to ruminate in the intervals of sleep.  But whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun.  I use spectacles at night, but not necessarily in the day, unless in reading small print.  My hearing is distinct in particular conversation, but confused when several voices cross each other, which unfits me for the society of the table.  I have been more fortunate than my friend in the article of health.  So free from catarrhs that I have not had one (in the breast, I mean) on an average of eight or ten years through life.  I ascribe this exemption partly to the habit of bathing my feet in cold water every morning for sixty years past.  A fever of more than twenty-four hours I have not had above two or three times in my life.  A periodical headache has afflicted me occasionally, once, perhaps,