Introduction
“Foolish the doctor who despises knowledge acquired by the ancients.” - Hippocrates
Imagine being healthy, never being sick, always being comfortable. Imagine a life without aches and pains. Imagine having a strong, active body; a trim, lean figure. The ancient Greeks knew that diet and exercise were the keys to health, and they have much to teach us about such practices. The ancient art of hygiene, the balancing of the body so as to gain and maintain health, is a 2500 year old tradition. These are the things that Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine writing in the 400s BC, tells us how to do. In this book, we'll explore the ancient tradition of Western health practices by asking the question: what would Hippocrates say? What would Hippocrates tell us if we asked him how to be healthy?
In order to answer this question, we need to start by imagining our bodies the way he imagined the body. The flesh of our bodies is made of the earth, and the life force within us is a flame that burns within our flesh. We hold within us the flame of life, and we melt the flesh of our bodies with each passing second. We are born with only so much heat and with only so much flesh. Both must be tended. We must eat food to restock our flesh so that the fire of life has something to burn, and we must exercise by living active lives in order to kindle the flame of life. Even though we replenish our bodies with eating and even though we fan the flame with exercise, the process of replenishment is not perfect, and it does not last forever. The flame slowly wanes cold. The moisture of our flesh eventually dries up. Eventually we grow cold and dry, and when the heat and the moisture are gone, we die.
This image of life as a flame which consumes its moisture, of heat growing cold but being kindled by exercise, and of moisture drying out but being maintained by eating, is the ancient way of imagining how the body functions. It was the way that Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician and the Father of Medicine, imagined things, and it was the way that Galen, the famous Roman doctor, did too. It was the guiding mythology of ancient medicine. We use the word ‘mythology’ here not in a derogatory sense, but in the sense of a story that helped to make sense of the art of medicine. It was the theory behind the practice. This mythology is the way Hippocrates and Galen, and many other physicians of ancient times, imagined things to be, and it helped to organize their thinking and actions. As we shall discuss in the pages of this book, this ancient way of imagining how the body functions proves to be extremely useful. It will help us to reimagine the concept of health, and it will help guide us to make healthy decisions.
This is a book about health, and the word ‘health’ comes from a Germanic word which means ‘whole.’ Being healthy is about being whole. To the ancient mind, to be whole was to have one’s flame burning strongly, and to have plenty of good moisture for it to burn. Health, or wholeness, is about having the right amount of heat and the right amount of moisture. But as we shall see, too much of a good thing is not a good thing at all. The key to health is to have everything in proper balance.
We need to gain a deeper understanding of this ancient mythology of health if we are to be able to make good use of it. The basic idea is that our bodies are made of a mixture of heat, coldness, moisture, and dryness. Too much of any of these things is what causes disease. If we have too much heat, then we’ll not only burn up, but the heat will also dry us out. We’ll be charred crisps. On the other hand, if we have an excess of cold, then we won’t be able to keep the flame of life going, and we’ll get overloaded with moisture because there won’t be enough heat to keep us reasonably dry. The same is true of too much moisture and of too much dryness: too much or too little of anything leads to problems. The key is to balance each of the four forces: to be hot but not too hot, cold but not too cold, wet but not too wet, and dry but not too dry.
Health is balance, and the word ‘balance’ really is the key word for health. The word ‘balance’ comes from the Latin ‘bi-’ meaning ‘two’ and ‘lanx’ meaning ‘scalepan.’ The word literally means ‘having two scalepans.’ In other words, to balance is to evenly distribute two things. If we could extend this to four things, that of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness, then it would be the perfect word for our purposes. Perhaps ‘quadlanx’ should be our term, but for simplicity’s sake we will stick with the word ‘balance.' Galen expresses the fantasy of balanced health quite nicely in the following quote:
According to our standards, the ideal body weight is midway between thin and [obese].... And likewise of the other extremes, the ideal is such that one could not call it either hirsute or bald, soft or hard, white or black, large-veined or small-veined, irascible or serene, drowsy or wakeful, sluggish or alert, voluptuous or frigid. And if the exact mean of all the extremes were in all parts of the body, this would be the best to observe as being the symmetry most suitable for all activities. (Galen, Hygiene, Book 1, Chapter 6.)
A useful image for this ancient idea of health is that we each must balance on a wobble board. Imagine a circular board with a rounded bottom on which one must stand. The front of the board is coldness. The back of the board is heat. The right side is moisture, and the left side is dryness. As we attempt to balance on this board, if we tilt too far in any direction, then we end up getting some form of disease. If we topple backward into heat, then we may end up with heartburn. If we fall rightward into excessive moisture, then we may end up with diarrhea. The idea is to stay balanced at all times.
Life is a constant challenge to our balance. As we will discuss in detail, the weather presents us with heat, cold, dryness, and moisture, in varying degrees throughout the year. As we age, we grow dryer and colder. We are each born with different propensities, some easily becoming hot; others cold, dry, or wet. And our actions in life can heat us, cool us down, dry us out, or drown us in moisture. Life knocks us around, and it is our job to stay balanced on the wobble board. A healthy person is someone who keeps him- or herself balanced.
We are going to be learning from Hippocrates and Galen in this book. Many quotes from each of them will appear in these pages. They will serve as our teachers about health. Hippocrates is said to have been born in 460 BC. He is considered the Father of Medicine. His writings, many of which were not actually written by him but which have been attributed to him through the ages, form the beginnings of Western medical thought. They are full of ancient wisdom about health. Galen, Hippocrates’ greatest admirer, was born in 131 AD. He was the physician for the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Galen championed the works of Hippocrates and expanded upon them, carrying on the tradition of ancient medicine. One of his books, entitled Hygiene, was written specifically to help people to become healthy and to stay healthy. Galen’s Hygiene will be frequently quoted as we explore the ancient ideas of health.
In this book we’ll be asking ourselves: What would Hippocrates say? It’s the question Galen seems to have asked himself throughout his career as a physician. By asking such a question, we search for firm ground on which to place our feet, a rock upon which to stand that carries the authority of our ancestors and the weight of history. It’s the key question for our health: what would Hippocrates, the hero of the ancient art of health, say to us if we were to ask him about our health? If we were to ask Hippocrates how we could live healthier lives, what would he say? That’s what this book tries to answer.
It’s important to note that we are not literally asking Hippocrates this question. He is long-dead, many of his writings were not even written by him, and he wrote so long ago that his writings cannot possibly speak to the exact needs of today. Instead we are using Hippocrates as an imaginary figure to guide us. We hope to speak with his force, with his character, with his essence. It is his image that we seek to find in this book. Galen seems to be Hippocrates reborn, a man of similar disposition and calling. We ask for their imaginary answers to our questions about health.
What Hippocrates has to say will prove to be very useful. The ancient ideas about health really do work. The theory, though perhaps literally wrong, is imaginatively powerful, for it guides us into useful actions. The ancient ideas about health are a lot like Newton’s laws of physics, which, after Einstein, are known to be literally incorrect, but they are every bit as useful as they ever were for everyday purposes. For all intents and purposes in our daily lives, gravity still pulls down toward the center of the earth, even though physicists now imagine space and time to be curved. It is likewise for the ancient concepts of health. When we imagine an excess of heat in our bodies, it’s very easy to understand that we need to do something to cool it down. The images are very powerful, and they have an effect on our imaginations as well. It’s amazing how quickly a sore throat reduces in intensity when it is imagined to be caused by excessive moisture oozing out of the head, and thus treated with herbs that will dry it. The herbs may have absolutely no actual, literal effect on the sore throat, but in the world of the imagination, the phlegm is dried, and the sore throat is soothed.
The ideas that we will be discussing in this book are ancient. They are extremely useful, and they carry a profound wisdom. But we must be careful not to take them too literally. The argument we will be making in this book is not that these ancient ideas are superior to our modern ideas. It isn’t about who is right and who is wrong. It’s about what is useful. The challenge for anyone reading this book is the challenge of being able to imagine things in multiple, sometimes conflicting ways. The next time we catch a cold and have thick snot dripping from the nose, we want to be able to imagine it as both a viral infection and an excess of rheum (which is what the ancients called this substance) in the head. Certainly modern medicine is correct in saying that a virus has entered the body. But that is not the only legitimate way of imagining what is happening. It is also true that, if the nose runs with thick yellow snot, then there is an excess of rheum in the head being purged through the nose. If we can’t imagine the virus, then we can’t do anything about it, such as washing our hands to keep from spreading the virus to others. In the same way, if we can’t imagine the excess of rheum, then we can’t do anything to manage it. Hippocrates would tell us that the rheum is excessive because the brain is too moist and needs to be dried. He would suggest certain drying herbs. Both the idea of the virus and the idea of the rheum are extremely useful in managing a thick, snotty nose. But we have to be able to imagine both if we want to be able to benefit from both. Both have merit. The modern mythology is useful, and so is the ancient mythology. The ancient mythology was actively used for thousands of years. The modern and the ancient don’t have to compete with each other for which is ‘right.’ They can both be useful.
In order to benefit from the ancient wisdom of Hippocrates, we must be able to imagine things the way he imagined them. We must imagine our bodies as complex amalgams of heat, coldness, moisture, and dryness. We must imagine ourselves in need of constant balance. We stand upon the wobble board, striving to keep level.
Many of the ideas in this book will inspire us to make changes, to try out some seemingly new (though actually very old) concepts about health. But there is one major piece of ancient advice that we must bear in mind: health abhors sudden changes. Galen says that changes should “... be done by degrees, for nature abhors all sudden change,” (Galen, Art of Physick, Ch 86) and Hippocrates says,
It is changes that are chiefly responsible for diseases, especially the greatest changes, the violent alterations both in the seasons and in other things. But seasons which come on gradually are the safest, as are gradual changes of regimen and temperature, and gradual changes from one period of life to another. (Hippocrates, Humours, Ch 16)
If we are going to make a change, then we must make it a gradual change. If we’re going to start eating a drier diet, then we should replace a few moistening foods with a few drying foods, not change everything all at once. Health does not result from going ‘cold turkey’! Make it a slow, steady transition. If we make drastic changes, then we will end up getting hurt. Making slow changes is one of the first and primary rules of the wisdom of Hippocrates.
Perhaps the most important thing Hippocrates has to say to us is the following. We are each born with a certain constitution, with an individual propensity for heat or cold, dryness or moisture. As we age, our constitution changes. The world around us, most notably the seasons and the weather, add heat or coldness, dryness or moisture. All of these things affect us and make us more or less prone to disease. But we do not control our constitutions, we cannot stop aging, and we cannot control the weather. This leaves us seemingly defenseless. How can we balance ourselves if the world is just knocking us around without any way for us to regain our footing? The answer is that we are not as defenseless as it may seem. We do have control over our food and over our exercise, and therefore diet and exercise are our primary means of attempting to balance. Hippocrates explains: “For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health. For it is the nature of exercise to use up material, but of food and drink to make good deficiencies” (Hippocrates, Regimen 1, Ch 2). Diet and exercise are the ways that we can adjust ourselves on the wobble board of health. When life pushes us around, diet and exercise keep us from falling. The flip side of this is that diet and exercise can also make things much worse. They are powerful tools that we must learn to use for balance instead of imbalance.
In this book we will first discuss the things over which we have no control: the seasons, our constitutions, and aging. Then we will discuss how to recognize when we have been thrown off-balance by learning to recognize the signs of imbalance. Then we will discuss what we can do about imbalance by learning to use diet and exercise to balance ourselves. And finally, and most importantly, we will discuss how to make use of what Hippocrates says not just for health, but for living our lives with more vitality.
This book is a practical guide to ancient health practices. It is not about treating diseases, but about the ancient ideas of how to be healthy and stay healthy. It is about balancing the forces of life so that we can stay healthy and avoid the need for medical treatment. But of course, once we get a disease, we should not try to manage it on our own with the ideas in this book. This book does not substitute for real medical help. Instead, it is a way to reimagine the concept of health itself, and to become truly healthy and more vitally alive.
Imagine being healthy, never being sick, always being comfortable. Imagine a life without aches and pains. Imagine having a strong, active body; a trim, lean figure. The ancient Greeks knew that diet and exercise were the keys to health, and they have much to teach us about such practices. The ancient art of hygiene, the balancing of the body so as to gain and maintain health, is a 2500 year old tradition. These are the things that Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine writing in the 400s BC, tells us how to do. In this book, we'll explore the ancient tradition of Western health practices by asking the question: what would Hippocrates say? What would Hippocrates tell us if we asked him how to be healthy?
In order to answer this question, we need to start by imagining our bodies the way he imagined the body. The flesh of our bodies is made of the earth, and the life force within us is a flame that burns within our flesh. We hold within us the flame of life, and we melt the flesh of our bodies with each passing second. We are born with only so much heat and with only so much flesh. Both must be tended. We must eat food to restock our flesh so that the fire of life has something to burn, and we must exercise by living active lives in order to kindle the flame of life. Even though we replenish our bodies with eating and even though we fan the flame with exercise, the process of replenishment is not perfect, and it does not last forever. The flame slowly wanes cold. The moisture of our flesh eventually dries up. Eventually we grow cold and dry, and when the heat and the moisture are gone, we die.
This image of life as a flame which consumes its moisture, of heat growing cold but being kindled by exercise, and of moisture drying out but being maintained by eating, is the ancient way of imagining how the body functions. It was the way that Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician and the Father of Medicine, imagined things, and it was the way that Galen, the famous Roman doctor, did too. It was the guiding mythology of ancient medicine. We use the word ‘mythology’ here not in a derogatory sense, but in the sense of a story that helped to make sense of the art of medicine. It was the theory behind the practice. This mythology is the way Hippocrates and Galen, and many other physicians of ancient times, imagined things to be, and it helped to organize their thinking and actions. As we shall discuss in the pages of this book, this ancient way of imagining how the body functions proves to be extremely useful. It will help us to reimagine the concept of health, and it will help guide us to make healthy decisions.
This is a book about health, and the word ‘health’ comes from a Germanic word which means ‘whole.’ Being healthy is about being whole. To the ancient mind, to be whole was to have one’s flame burning strongly, and to have plenty of good moisture for it to burn. Health, or wholeness, is about having the right amount of heat and the right amount of moisture. But as we shall see, too much of a good thing is not a good thing at all. The key to health is to have everything in proper balance.
We need to gain a deeper understanding of this ancient mythology of health if we are to be able to make good use of it. The basic idea is that our bodies are made of a mixture of heat, coldness, moisture, and dryness. Too much of any of these things is what causes disease. If we have too much heat, then we’ll not only burn up, but the heat will also dry us out. We’ll be charred crisps. On the other hand, if we have an excess of cold, then we won’t be able to keep the flame of life going, and we’ll get overloaded with moisture because there won’t be enough heat to keep us reasonably dry. The same is true of too much moisture and of too much dryness: too much or too little of anything leads to problems. The key is to balance each of the four forces: to be hot but not too hot, cold but not too cold, wet but not too wet, and dry but not too dry.
Health is balance, and the word ‘balance’ really is the key word for health. The word ‘balance’ comes from the Latin ‘bi-’ meaning ‘two’ and ‘lanx’ meaning ‘scalepan.’ The word literally means ‘having two scalepans.’ In other words, to balance is to evenly distribute two things. If we could extend this to four things, that of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness, then it would be the perfect word for our purposes. Perhaps ‘quadlanx’ should be our term, but for simplicity’s sake we will stick with the word ‘balance.' Galen expresses the fantasy of balanced health quite nicely in the following quote:
According to our standards, the ideal body weight is midway between thin and [obese].... And likewise of the other extremes, the ideal is such that one could not call it either hirsute or bald, soft or hard, white or black, large-veined or small-veined, irascible or serene, drowsy or wakeful, sluggish or alert, voluptuous or frigid. And if the exact mean of all the extremes were in all parts of the body, this would be the best to observe as being the symmetry most suitable for all activities. (Galen, Hygiene, Book 1, Chapter 6.)
A useful image for this ancient idea of health is that we each must balance on a wobble board. Imagine a circular board with a rounded bottom on which one must stand. The front of the board is coldness. The back of the board is heat. The right side is moisture, and the left side is dryness. As we attempt to balance on this board, if we tilt too far in any direction, then we end up getting some form of disease. If we topple backward into heat, then we may end up with heartburn. If we fall rightward into excessive moisture, then we may end up with diarrhea. The idea is to stay balanced at all times.
Life is a constant challenge to our balance. As we will discuss in detail, the weather presents us with heat, cold, dryness, and moisture, in varying degrees throughout the year. As we age, we grow dryer and colder. We are each born with different propensities, some easily becoming hot; others cold, dry, or wet. And our actions in life can heat us, cool us down, dry us out, or drown us in moisture. Life knocks us around, and it is our job to stay balanced on the wobble board. A healthy person is someone who keeps him- or herself balanced.
We are going to be learning from Hippocrates and Galen in this book. Many quotes from each of them will appear in these pages. They will serve as our teachers about health. Hippocrates is said to have been born in 460 BC. He is considered the Father of Medicine. His writings, many of which were not actually written by him but which have been attributed to him through the ages, form the beginnings of Western medical thought. They are full of ancient wisdom about health. Galen, Hippocrates’ greatest admirer, was born in 131 AD. He was the physician for the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Galen championed the works of Hippocrates and expanded upon them, carrying on the tradition of ancient medicine. One of his books, entitled Hygiene, was written specifically to help people to become healthy and to stay healthy. Galen’s Hygiene will be frequently quoted as we explore the ancient ideas of health.
In this book we’ll be asking ourselves: What would Hippocrates say? It’s the question Galen seems to have asked himself throughout his career as a physician. By asking such a question, we search for firm ground on which to place our feet, a rock upon which to stand that carries the authority of our ancestors and the weight of history. It’s the key question for our health: what would Hippocrates, the hero of the ancient art of health, say to us if we were to ask him about our health? If we were to ask Hippocrates how we could live healthier lives, what would he say? That’s what this book tries to answer.
It’s important to note that we are not literally asking Hippocrates this question. He is long-dead, many of his writings were not even written by him, and he wrote so long ago that his writings cannot possibly speak to the exact needs of today. Instead we are using Hippocrates as an imaginary figure to guide us. We hope to speak with his force, with his character, with his essence. It is his image that we seek to find in this book. Galen seems to be Hippocrates reborn, a man of similar disposition and calling. We ask for their imaginary answers to our questions about health.
What Hippocrates has to say will prove to be very useful. The ancient ideas about health really do work. The theory, though perhaps literally wrong, is imaginatively powerful, for it guides us into useful actions. The ancient ideas about health are a lot like Newton’s laws of physics, which, after Einstein, are known to be literally incorrect, but they are every bit as useful as they ever were for everyday purposes. For all intents and purposes in our daily lives, gravity still pulls down toward the center of the earth, even though physicists now imagine space and time to be curved. It is likewise for the ancient concepts of health. When we imagine an excess of heat in our bodies, it’s very easy to understand that we need to do something to cool it down. The images are very powerful, and they have an effect on our imaginations as well. It’s amazing how quickly a sore throat reduces in intensity when it is imagined to be caused by excessive moisture oozing out of the head, and thus treated with herbs that will dry it. The herbs may have absolutely no actual, literal effect on the sore throat, but in the world of the imagination, the phlegm is dried, and the sore throat is soothed.
The ideas that we will be discussing in this book are ancient. They are extremely useful, and they carry a profound wisdom. But we must be careful not to take them too literally. The argument we will be making in this book is not that these ancient ideas are superior to our modern ideas. It isn’t about who is right and who is wrong. It’s about what is useful. The challenge for anyone reading this book is the challenge of being able to imagine things in multiple, sometimes conflicting ways. The next time we catch a cold and have thick snot dripping from the nose, we want to be able to imagine it as both a viral infection and an excess of rheum (which is what the ancients called this substance) in the head. Certainly modern medicine is correct in saying that a virus has entered the body. But that is not the only legitimate way of imagining what is happening. It is also true that, if the nose runs with thick yellow snot, then there is an excess of rheum in the head being purged through the nose. If we can’t imagine the virus, then we can’t do anything about it, such as washing our hands to keep from spreading the virus to others. In the same way, if we can’t imagine the excess of rheum, then we can’t do anything to manage it. Hippocrates would tell us that the rheum is excessive because the brain is too moist and needs to be dried. He would suggest certain drying herbs. Both the idea of the virus and the idea of the rheum are extremely useful in managing a thick, snotty nose. But we have to be able to imagine both if we want to be able to benefit from both. Both have merit. The modern mythology is useful, and so is the ancient mythology. The ancient mythology was actively used for thousands of years. The modern and the ancient don’t have to compete with each other for which is ‘right.’ They can both be useful.
In order to benefit from the ancient wisdom of Hippocrates, we must be able to imagine things the way he imagined them. We must imagine our bodies as complex amalgams of heat, coldness, moisture, and dryness. We must imagine ourselves in need of constant balance. We stand upon the wobble board, striving to keep level.
Many of the ideas in this book will inspire us to make changes, to try out some seemingly new (though actually very old) concepts about health. But there is one major piece of ancient advice that we must bear in mind: health abhors sudden changes. Galen says that changes should “... be done by degrees, for nature abhors all sudden change,” (Galen, Art of Physick, Ch 86) and Hippocrates says,
It is changes that are chiefly responsible for diseases, especially the greatest changes, the violent alterations both in the seasons and in other things. But seasons which come on gradually are the safest, as are gradual changes of regimen and temperature, and gradual changes from one period of life to another. (Hippocrates, Humours, Ch 16)
If we are going to make a change, then we must make it a gradual change. If we’re going to start eating a drier diet, then we should replace a few moistening foods with a few drying foods, not change everything all at once. Health does not result from going ‘cold turkey’! Make it a slow, steady transition. If we make drastic changes, then we will end up getting hurt. Making slow changes is one of the first and primary rules of the wisdom of Hippocrates.
Perhaps the most important thing Hippocrates has to say to us is the following. We are each born with a certain constitution, with an individual propensity for heat or cold, dryness or moisture. As we age, our constitution changes. The world around us, most notably the seasons and the weather, add heat or coldness, dryness or moisture. All of these things affect us and make us more or less prone to disease. But we do not control our constitutions, we cannot stop aging, and we cannot control the weather. This leaves us seemingly defenseless. How can we balance ourselves if the world is just knocking us around without any way for us to regain our footing? The answer is that we are not as defenseless as it may seem. We do have control over our food and over our exercise, and therefore diet and exercise are our primary means of attempting to balance. Hippocrates explains: “For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health. For it is the nature of exercise to use up material, but of food and drink to make good deficiencies” (Hippocrates, Regimen 1, Ch 2). Diet and exercise are the ways that we can adjust ourselves on the wobble board of health. When life pushes us around, diet and exercise keep us from falling. The flip side of this is that diet and exercise can also make things much worse. They are powerful tools that we must learn to use for balance instead of imbalance.
In this book we will first discuss the things over which we have no control: the seasons, our constitutions, and aging. Then we will discuss how to recognize when we have been thrown off-balance by learning to recognize the signs of imbalance. Then we will discuss what we can do about imbalance by learning to use diet and exercise to balance ourselves. And finally, and most importantly, we will discuss how to make use of what Hippocrates says not just for health, but for living our lives with more vitality.
This book is a practical guide to ancient health practices. It is not about treating diseases, but about the ancient ideas of how to be healthy and stay healthy. It is about balancing the forces of life so that we can stay healthy and avoid the need for medical treatment. But of course, once we get a disease, we should not try to manage it on our own with the ideas in this book. This book does not substitute for real medical help. Instead, it is a way to reimagine the concept of health itself, and to become truly healthy and more vitally alive.
(Available at www.amazon.com)