LA POLITICA DE SEGURIDAD Y PLAN DE CONTINGENCIAS
5.2.9 DEFINICIÓN DE FUNCIONES Y RESPONSABILIDADES
In 1600, a young Welshman named William Vaughan (1575-1641) published a short handbook of personal hygiene, entitled Naturall and Artificiall Directions for Health. The treatise, printed in London by Richard Bradocke and dedicated to William’s sister Margaret, had no other avowed ambition but to explain in concise and accessible terms how to keep healthy in both body and mind. A recent graduate in civil law from Jesus College, Oxford, Vaughan made it clear from the outset that he had never received any formal medical training. His advice was entirely based on personal experience, gained during a difficult period of his life, ‘when sorrow and discontentment had almost dryed and stifled up my vitall spirites’.2 Instead of resorting to professional care, Vaughan chose to engage in a process of self-analysis in order to establish what was good and what was harmful for his health. As he revealed to his sister, ‘the necessarie regard of mine owne health’ eventually paid off: Vaughan’s self-made regimen not only allowed him to restore his health in due course, but also ensured its preservation thereafter.
1 Barrough 1583: 7r.
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Most importantly, though, the young Welshman felt that he had learnt several lessons in the process: first and foremost, that the ‘chusing of a good aire must (for the preservation of health) obtaine the chief place’.3 Air, indeed, exerts a powerful influence not only on ‘the bodies qualities’ but also on ‘the soules affections’, so that its quality can determine the physical, mental, and moral well-being of a person.4 According to Vaughan, the best air is fresh, clean, and temperate, without any ‘extremetie of cold, heat, and moysture’.5 But ‘what shall a man doe’, he wondered, ‘if the aire be either too hot or too cold?’ Vaughan’s answer to this question was three-fold. First of all, a person can ‘use cold things to keep away the heat, and hot things to expel the cold. He must adde dry things to moyst, and moyst to dry’. Alternatively, one can ‘depart thence into another place’, where the air is better or at any rate more suited to one’s body. The third and last remedy, to be used ‘if the aire be corrupt, and that a man cannot remove thence very quickly’, is to ‘artificially rectify it’.6
Vaughan’s tripartite solution neatly summarizes early modern attitudes to environmental influence. The latter was often viewed as a double-edged sword: just as a salubrious and pleasant site could guarantee good health and enhance positive moral qualities in its inhabitants, so a flawed environment would wreak enormous havoc in human life. Vaughan’s proposed remedies to evil environmental influences—corrective regimen, relocation, and direct environmental change—were among the most commonly theorized and practiced throughout the early-modern period. They belonged in fact to an even larger, centuries-long tradition, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, first took
3 Vaughan 1600: 2.
4 Vaughan 1600: 52. 5 Vaughan 1600: 2-3. 6 Vaughan 1600: 3.
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shape in classical Greece and continued virtually uninterrupted for over two thousand years.
What early modern authors inherited from this tradition was, among other things, a special preference for regimen as a privileged counter-measure against environmental influence. Regimen (a regulated manner of living covering all aspects of a person’s lifestyle, from diet and exercise to sleep and personal hygiene) was by far the most widely recommended way of coping with the influence of climate—and for a number of reasons. First of all, it was thought to be very effective. As this chapter will amply demonstrate, both classical and Renaissance medicine pictured the human body as a flexible entity, easily moulded by an array of external determinants—also called ‘non-naturals’ so as to emphasise that they were not inscribed within one’s innate constitution.7 Air, as Vaughan’s example indicates, topped the list of such non-natural things altering human health for better or for worse, but other elements needed to be factored in as well. Diet, exercise, sleep, evacuation, and the so-called passions of the mind were all viewed as important aspects of a person’s lifestyle that could, if properly administered, balance and defuse the negative effects of a hostile environment.
The second reason for preferring regimen to other ways of coping with environmental influence lay in its alleged ease and accessibility. Compared to geographical displacement and environmental change, regimen required relatively little effort and was promptly available to anyone wanting to improve his or her health and character in spite of an unfavourable environment. Environmental change, on the other hand, called for resources beyond the reach of isolated individuals, especially when implemented on a large scale. And while changing one’s place of residence offered the speediest way of
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escaping the effects of a bad climate, relocation was only an option for a restricted number of people who were at liberty to choose where to live. Regimen too obviously required some means (enough to decide, for instance, what should be on the table for dinner, or how many hours to spend in bed every day), but on the whole early modern authors concurred in presenting it as a much more universal remedy to environmental influence than the other two.
Behind such an emphasis on ease and affordability undoubtedly lay astute book- marketing strategies: in actual practice, following a regimen was far less straightforward than this popular dietetic literature wanted readers to believe. The fundamental premise of regimen—namely the great flexibility of the human body—was also its main weakness. If humans are so easily changed by what they eat and how they live, the slightest negligence can often have catastrophic consequences. Especially in the case of corrective regimens— that is, regimens adopted in order to counteract unwanted environmental influence— persistence and effectiveness went hand in hand.8
Following a loosely Aristotelian tradition describing custom (hexis, habitus) as some sort of ‘second nature’, regimen was thought to acquire its transformative powers by constant repetition.9 Failure to live by its rules inevitably caused the weaker disposition to yield to the inclinations of inborn nature and thus ultimately to the sway of place and climate. According to Jean Bodin, one of the most prominent representatives of sixteenth- century climate theory, not even the best corrective regimen could ever go so far as to ‘completely eradicate every trace of the prior nature’ of a person.10 A century later, the English physician Humphrey Brooke echoed Bodin’s views by describing custom as an
8 See, e.g., Lemnius 1561: 15v-17v.
9 See particularly Book 2 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In Metaph., 5.1022b, Aristotle specifically used health as an example of hexis. See also Cic., Fin., 5.25.74.
10 Bodin 2013: 336 (5.183): ‘Vix fieri potest, ut naturae prioris vestigia omnino tollantur’. On Bodin’s climate theory, see above, 1.3.2.
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‘adventitious […] second nature’, ‘arriving in time to a power somewhat resembling nature, but never acquiring such an identity, as to become nature her self’.11 Corrective regimen thus had to entertain a daily struggle against innate disposition, lest the latter prevail. As Bodin states, nothing less than ‘God’s help or incessant discipline’ (‘diuturna disciplina’) could overcome the ‘power of place and stars’ and the natural inclinations that these engendered.12 Elsewhere the Frenchman provides a famous example taken from Polybius’s Histories: when the Cynaetheans, an ancient Arcadian tribe, stopped practising the strict musical discipline that other Arcadian nations scrupulously observed, they quickly reverted to the beastlike character (‘agriotēs’) that the harsh local environment naturally elicited in natives of that region.13
Regimen was therefore only effective through an active, persistent, and meticulous care of the self. In its positive dimension, the ‘dietetic way’ of contrasting environmental influence was much more than a type of medical therapy: it was a way of life, ‘a whole manner of forming oneself as a subject’ to put it in Michel Foucault’s terms, promoting an enhanced sense of self-awareness and self-responsibility in those who practiced it.14 The deep ethical connotations of regimen, already prominent (as we shall see) in ancient dietary theories, were likewise stressed by early modern writers, who often explicitly emphasized the double virtues—at once medical and moral—of a ‘temperate’ lifestyle. At the very same time, however, the more commitment regimen required, the less likely people were to embrace it. The more it promised physical and moral perfection to a select few, the less it appealed to a vast majority of ordinary people. Some of the authors
11 Brooke 1650: 34-35.
12 Bodin 2013: 222 (5.4): ‘Sed imprimis illud statuo, nullam esse locorum aut coelestium syderum tantam vim, quae necessitatem sit allatura (quod ne cogitare quidem fas est) ab iis tamen homines sic affici, ut naturae legem nisi ope divina, aut diuturna disciplina superare non possint’.
13 The original story is in Polyb., 4.21.1-12; compare Bodin 1986, vol. 5: 48 (5.1). 14 Foucault 1987: 108. See also Temkin 1973: 38.
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considered in this chapter acutely sensed the danger and attempted to make their proposed regimens as easy and attractive as possible, for instance by avoiding rigid precepts and by leaving abundant leeway for their readers to adjust their own lifestyles as they wished.
While this solution ensured the continued commercial success of books of medical advice throughout the early modern period, it did not, however, eliminate the underlying problem. Corrective regimen was an effective remedy to environmental influence only insofar as individuals voluntarily adopted and constantly practiced it. In theory, it may have been the simplest and most readily accessible means of contrasting the power of place and climate; in actual fact, its demanding nature made it an elitist practice unsuitable for the masses. It is then unsurprising that, despite overwhelming medical consensus on the efficacity of regimen, early-modern climate theorists seeking ways to improve national character on a large scale kept looking at other instruments of public reform—including legislation, religion, public education, but also, as we shall see in the next chapters, forced resettlement and environmental engineering.15 The further we advance into the seventeenth century, the stronger these alternative ways of coping with environmental influence grow with respect to classic corrective regimen. Yet the latter, far from disappearing from the picture, lived on well into the nineteenth century as a useful preventive practice to be performed at a private level, and corroborating, rather than competing with, such larger governmental plans.16
This chapter reconstructs the story of corrective regimen from its classical roots to the early eighteenth century, following its evolution through time and space, and focusing specifically on the lively international dialogue that took place in early modern Europe around the topics of diet, lifestyle, and climate. A first part will trace Renaissance dietetic
15 On legislation and public education as means of countering climatic influence, see, for instance, Floyd- Wilson 2003: 117-18.
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ideas back to their ancient sources, focusing on the thought of two late-antique authors, Plutarch and Galen, whose works were particularly important for Renaissance theories of hygiene. I shall then move on to analyse the ways in which corrective regimen was described in early modern books of medical advice, outlining a few major points of consensus and disagreement within this literature. Here I suggest that the great diversity of professional backgrounds, aims and motives, and intended audiences that characterizes authors of early modern dietaries is partly responsible for theoretical disagreement in this field. I shall then conclude with a few thoughts on the documented decrease in publishing output for health regimens from the seventeenth century onwards—a phenomenon that may be related to the decline of corrective regimen as a remedy to environmental influence in this period and to the search for more effective ways of contrasting the power of climate on a wider scale.