ABSTRACT
The biggest challenges in public health today are often related to attitudes, diet and exercise. In many ways, this marks a return to the state of medicine in the eighteenth century, when ideals of healthy living were a much more central part of the European consciousness than they have become since the advent of modern clinical medicine. Enlightenment advice on healthy lifestyle was often still discussed in terms of the six non-naturals – airs and places, food and drink, exercise, excretion and retention, and sleep and emotions. This volume examines what it meant to live healthily in the Enlightenment in the context of those non-naturals, showing both the profound continuities from Antiquity and the impact of newer conceptions of the body.
Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429465642
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter 1|16 pages
“The most valuable part of medicine”
part 1|48 pages
Airs, waters and places
part 2|44 pages
Food and drink
chapter 4|19 pages
Eating after the climacteric
part 3|52 pages
Exercise and rest
chapter 6|28 pages
“For it is the debilitating fibres that exercise restores”
part 4|42 pages
Sleep and wakefulness
chapter 8|21 pages
“That venerable and princely custom of long-lying abed”
part 5|38 pages
Excretion and retention
chapter 10|18 pages
Keeping the body open
part 6|46 pages
Passions and emotions
chapter 12|21 pages
Feel-good tunes
part 7|26 pages
Epilogue