ABSTRACT

Our legacy from ancient Greece includes the Olympics and the idea that education should develop the body as well as the mind. In their transmission to the modern world, three physicians have played crucial roles: the Greek Galen of Pergamon, the Italian Girolamo Mercuriale, and the Englishman William Penny Brookes. All three advocated exercise to promote health and fitness. Galen and Mercuriale, however, were hostile to full-time athletics and competitions like the Olympic games. Brookes, on the contrary, was instrumental in the nineteenth-century Olympic movement which led to Coubertin’s games of 1896.