ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an introduction to the volume, briefly setting out the topic of the non-naturals in the long eighteenth century. Dietetics was not a peripheral subject but central to innumerable books, often published in great quantities, in a world of expanding literacy. Its centrality is also reflected in the regularity with which physicians’ correspondence with patients dealt with advice on how to stay healthy. Nor was it intellectually moribund. While it may have lacked the fireworks of the previous and subsequent eras and remained very much steeped in Hippocratic and Galenic thinking, it did produce a discourse on how to achieve a healthy long life that also reflected more innovative parts of medicine, notably in terms of nervous sensibility and a recasting of the humours in terms of chemistry. The dietetics of the period also reflected the Enlightenment context, focusing on the medical and moral perils of modern life and relishing the power of the individual to shape his or her own well-being in a way that has striking relevance for our own day.
