ABSTRACT
Tennis and paume are the same thing, yet their names widely differ. The game of tennis, nowadays one of the most silent, used to be one of the noisiest of games. In the royal game of tennis lies their cure, ‘because players are incessantly incited to shout and speak, either for appeals or for keeping the score’. Tissot, ‘surgeon-major in the 4th regiment of chevaux-legers,’ described tennis in his Gymnastique medicinale et chirurgicale as being most efficacious in cases of ‘paralysis of the pharynx, and of the tongue, which sometimes remains thick and heavy, to the extent that patients will stammer’. The French ‘Ordinance for the royal and honourable game of tennis, drawn up in twenty-four articles at Paris in the year 1592—Bene vivere et Ioetari’—prescribed in its first paragraph that players should choose to exercise their lungs in some different fashion.
