ABSTRACT
In Emile, published in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau maintained that 'the only useful branch of medicine is health theory, and this is less a science than a theory of virtue'. In today's debate about health in post-industrial service societies a healthy lifestyle is becoming increasingly important. There are two reasons for this: The nation-wide diseases have largely disappeared and other acute illnesses can be treated better than ever. This chapter discusses that exercise should be understood as one of the health resources that individuals can tap into. The chapter looks at normative discourses as presented by health advisors, and then give examples of exercise as mentioned in personal testimonies. This dual approach means that it is not only the upper and upper-middle classes. For a better assessment of how the ideas articulated by Frank were disseminated, the chapter also presents some random samples from the digitalised corpus of the 'Deutsche Autobiographien 1690-1930'.
