A manual of practical hygiene : intended especially for medical officers of the Army and for civil medical officers of health / by Edmund A. Parkes.

Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of practical hygiene : intended especially for medical officers of the Army and for civil medical officers of health / by Edmund A. Parkes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    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 incomparable 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. Yery early, indeed, the effects of diet and of exercise wrere 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 force 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 igno- rance of chemistry prevented any great advance in this direction. Hippocrates summed up the existing knowledge of his time on the six articles, which in after-days received the absurd name of the “ Hon-naturals. ”t 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. With the exception of the attempts of the alchemists, and of the chemical physicians, to discover some agent or drug which might increase or strengthen the principle of life,J the practice of hygiene remained within the same limits * Herodicus, one of the preceptors of Hippocrates, was the first to introduce medicinal gymnastics for the improvement of health and the cure of disease ; though gymnastics in train- ing for war had been used long before. Plutarch says of him, that labouring under a decay which he knew could not he perfectly cured, he was the first who blended the gymnastic art with physic, in such a manner as protracted to old age his own life, and the lives of others afflicted 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. + It was when chemistry was being rudely studied by the alchemists that an entirely different school of hygiene arose. The discovery of chemical agents, and the great effect they produce on the body, led to the notion that they could in some way aid the forces of life, and insure a prolonged, if not an eternal youth, and a life of ages, instead of one of years. This belief, the