"What is a healthy life? What is it to live well? How do our contemporary ways of thinking about health compare to the ways in which a healthy life was understood by our predecessors? In this authoritative new book, Klaus Bergdolt offers a panoramic overview of health and healthy living from the ancient world through to the middle of the nineteenth century, when scientific medicine began to gain ascendancy. He shows that the doctrine of dietetics - an exhortation to take personal responsibility for one's health - has played an important role in the history of the West for more than two millennia. The concern to achieve a vital 'balance' was the crux of the Western 'ars vivendi'. However, the art of healthy living has lost its traditional importance for us today, thanks largely to a change in the scientific basis of European medicine in the nineteenth century. Almost overnight, health was downgraded to something technical in character, something to be measured. Many of the simplest dietetic principles, such as seeking moderation, harmony, relaxation or regularity in the structure of one's life, have been forgotten. Notwithstanding his admiration for the achievements of modern medicine, Bergdolt argues that the decline of these ideas has been to the considerable detriment of society. He concludes that one of the key questions facing us today, at the dawn of the third millennium, is whether we can find a better balance between the achievements of scientific medicine and the wisdom afforded by centuries of reflection on the art of healthy living."--Jacket.
Prologue : The ancient advanced civilizations : Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia -- Greece ; The ideal of health in ancient Greece ; The Presocratics ; The Hippocratic corpus ; Diocles of Carystus, a fourth-century health pedagogue ; 'Knidic' dietetics ; Health in Plato and Aristotle ; Dietetics in Alexandria ; Cures and miracles, Aesculapius and Hygieia ; Public health care and sport ; Early Stoics and Cynics -- Rome ; People and literati: dietetics in ancient Rome ; New doctors, new theories ; Sport and baths ; The sacred tales of Publius Aelius Aristides ; The Roman Stoics : Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus ; Galen -- Jewish and early Christian traditions ; Jewish doctrines of health ; Christus medicus ; Early Christian doctrines of health -- Medieval traditions in the East and West ; Healing and health in early monasticism ; The first German pharmacopoeia ; Dietetics in Islam ; Medieval doctrines of health in the West ; Asceticism and mysticism : feasts and beauty care ; Western and Eastern clerical scholars : Maimonides, Petrus Hispanus, Roger Bacon ; Hildegard of Bingen ; Saints and miracle workers ; The power of the stars -- Doctrines of health in the Renaissance ; Petrarch's conception of health ; Alberti and other intellectuals around 1500 ; House books and manuals : health and literature ; Further humanists : Platina, More, Luther ; Philosophy of health and prophylaxis in Venice : Mercuriale, Rangone, Cornaro ; Gabriele Zerbi and the Gerontocomia ; Paracelsus' teachings on health ; Herbal books ; Dietetics in daily life -- Dietetics in the seventeenth century ; Cartesianism and conservative tendencies ; Van Helmont, Sylvius and other 'iatrochemists' ; Doctrines of health in England : the dietetics of the state ; Health through planning : the utopias ; The dietetics of the Enlightenment : philosophers, pedagogues, charlatans -- Doctrines of health in the eighteenth century ; Medical theories of health ; The French Enlightenment and Rousseau ; Tissot, Triller, Mai: health education at grassroots ; Public health care -- Around 1800 ; The notion of 'Lebenskraft' (vital force) : Hufeland and Kant ; The recurrent topic of a dietetic regime for intellectuals ; Alternative paths to health ; Goethe ; Romantic medicine : Schelling, Carus, Novalis -- The nineteenth century ; Trends in the nineteenth century ; Rudolf Virchow and the dietetics of reason ; Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the philosophical critique of positivism ; The revolution in nutrition and alternative paths to health ; Afterword.