Lifestyle and Medicine in the Enlightenment: The Six Non-Naturals in the Long Eighteenth Century

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 dwnldable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429465642

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.