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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 http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429465642
List of contents
1. "The Most Valuable Part of Medicine": The Six Non-Naturals in the Long Eighteenth Century; PART 1: AIRS, WATERS AND PLACES; 2. The Body is a Barometer: Dutch Doctors on Healthy Weather and Strong Constitutions; 3. Hot Climate and Health Care: Tropical Regions in the Dutch Atlantic, c.1600-c.1800; PART 2: FOOD AND DRINK; 4. Eating after the Climacteric: Food, Gender and Ageing in the Long Eighteenth Century; 5. The Impossible Ideal of Moderation: Food, Drink, and Longevity; PART 3: EXERCISE AND REST; 6. "For it is the debilitating fibres that execise restores": Movement, Morality and Moderation in Eighteenth-Century Medical Advice Literature; 7. The Healthy Body, Civic Virtue, Gender and the New Physical Education in Germany, 1770-1800; PART 4: SLEEP AND WAKEFULNESS; 8. "That venerable and princely custom of long-lying abed": Sleep and Civility in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Urban Society; 9. Wasted Days and Wasted Nights: Sleeping and Waking in the Long Eighteenth-Century; PART 5: EXCRETION AND RETENTION; 10. Keeping the body open. Impurity, excretions, and healthy living in the early modern period.; 11. Increasing and Reducing: Breastmilk Flows and Female Health; PART 6: PASSIONS AND EMOTIONS; 12. Feel-good tunes: Music Aesthetics, Performance and Well-being in the Eighteenth Century; 13. The Dietetics of the Soul in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century; EPILOGUE; 14. "That is more excellent which preserveth health and preventeth sicknesse." Continuity and Change in Vernacular Preventive Health Advice over the Early Modern Period
About the author
James Kennaway is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton. He is the author of Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease, also published by Routledge.
Rina Knoeff is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She has published on the history of medicine, health and the body in the Enlightenment.
Summary
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.
