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THE ART OF GYMNASTICS

BOOK ONE

On the Principles of Medicine.

Chapter I.

A large decorative woodcut initial 'V' set within a square border. Inside the letter is a circular medallion depicting a classical figure, possibly a philosopher or physician, seated and holding a book or scroll. The surrounding space is filled with ornamental floral motifs.

AS LONG AS men were content with very few things and did not know lavish tables or sumptuous banquets, and remained entirely ignorant of the gradually introduced custom of social drinking—as is recorded to have been the case in those first ages—diseases neither appeared, nor were their names even known. For example, Plato recorded that until the time of Socrates, the name for "distillations" (which the Greeks call catarrhsoriginal: "κατάῤῥους". In ancient medicine, this referred to a "down-flow" of excess humors, usually from the brain to the respiratory tract.), a term than which nothing is more common today, was unknown. For this reason, it is certain that at that time there were either very few uses for medicine, or none at all, and no established principles; Book 3 of the Republic. even though Homer, the most ancient author, wrote that Egypt possessed many herbs and many medicines.

But after the unspeakable plague of intemperance, the refined arts of cooks, the most delicate seasonings of feasts, and foreign blends of wines crept in among men, various kinds of diseases simultaneously and continually cropped up, forcing men to invent medicine. Indeed, they could have surely done without it forever, had not human—or rather, beastly—gluttony, the offspring of all vices, made the use of medicine the most necessary of all things.

Medicine, however, although in that first origin it was quite crude and uncultivated—when those ancients (as Herodotus and Galen report) used to expose the sick in public In the book titled The Physician. so that everyone might teach another what they held to be useful and proven by experience—was in later ages wonderfully adorned by Aesculapius The Greek god of medicine and healing., the physician known as the "Epidaurian" among the Cyrenaeans. He made medicine, as it were, into something urban and elegant rather than rustic. Yet even he was by no means able to bring it to perfection, since he devoted his work only to the diseased and the faint, and always had that one pursuit of curing; he either did not know there was any care for the healthy, or he utterly despised it. His successors later understood this and considered the care of the healthy so worthy of esteem that they believed medicine without this Gymnastics to be entire-