A manual of practical hygiene / by the late Edmund A. Parkes.

  • Edmund Alexander Parkes
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of practical hygiene / by the late Edmund A. Parkes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/844
    INTRODUCTION. Hygiene is the art of preserving health; that is, of obtaining the most perfect action of body and mind during as long a period as is consistent with the laws of life. In other words, it aims at rendering growth more perfect, decay less rapid, life more vigorous, death more remote. This art has been practised from the earliest times. Before Hippocrates there were treatises on hygiene, which that great master evidently embodied in his imcomparable works. It was then based on what we should now call empirical rules, viz., simply on observations of what seemed good or bad for health. Very early, indeed, the effects of diet and of exercise were carefully noticed, and were considered the basis of hygiene.^ Hippocrates, indeed, appears to have had a clear conception of the relation between the amount of food taken and of the mechanical energy produced by it; at least, he is extremely careful in pointing out that there must be an exact balance between food and exercise, and that disease results from excess either way. The effects on health of different kinds of air, of water, and to some extent of soils, were also considered at a very early date, though naturally the ignorance of chemistry prevented any great advance in this direction. Hippocrates summed up the existing knowledge of his time in the six articles, which in after-days received the absurd name of the “Von- naturals.”^ The six articles, whose regulation was considered indispensably necessary to the life of man, were—air, aliment, exercise and rest, sleep, and wakefulness, repletion and evacuation, the passions and affections of the mind. AVith the exception of the attempts of the alchemists, and of the chemi- cal physicians, to discover some agent or drug which might increase or 1 Herodicus, one of the ]ireceptors of Hippocrates, was tlie fir.st to introduce medicinal gymnastics for the improvement of health and the cure of disease ; though gymnastics in training for war had been used long before. Plutarch says of him that, labouring under a decay which he knew could not be perfectly cured, he was the first who blended the gymnastic art with physic, in such a manner as protected to old age his own life and the lives of others atflicted with the same disease. He was censured by Plato for keeping alive persons with crazy constitutions.—Mackenzie on Health. - This title originated in a sentence of Galen, and was introduced into use by the jargon of the Peripatetic school. It was employed in all treatises on hygiene for probably nearly 1500 years.