Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/841

Rh Burton concludes that "our own experience is the best physician; that diet which is most propitious to one is often pernicious to another. Such is the variety of palates, humors, and temperatures, let every man observe and be a law unto himself."

Sir Henry has made elsewhere some pertinent quotations from a certain Italian work, of some fame in its day, "Discorsi della Vita Sobria," written by Signor Luigi Cornaro. This amiable old gentleman, a native of Padua, addressed himself at the ripe age of eighty-three to give the world assurance how much a sober life could do. He repeated the assurance at ninety-five, and subsequently passed away, "without any agony, sitting in an elbow-chair, being above a hundred years old." An English translation of his Discourse was published in 1768, and from this Sir Henry has made his extracts. But an earlier translation, the work of George Herbert, was published at Cambridge in 1634, in a curious little volume with a very long title, "Hygiasticon, or the Right Course of preserving Life and Health unto Extreme Old Age, together with Soundness and Integrity of the Senses, Judgment, and Memory." This is really the title of the first essay in the book, originally written in Latin by one Leonard Lessius, a divine who has anticipated Sir Henry in the theory of the religious duty. "The consideration of this business," he says, as an excuse for handling such temporal concerns, "is not altogether physical, but in great part appertains to divinity and moral philosophy." Dr. Lessius holds both with Bacon and Burton in their opinion of the value of personal experience, but he treats the doctors somewhat cavalierly. "Many authors," thus his essay opens, "have written largely and very learnedly touching the preservation of health: but they charge men with so many rules, and exact so much observation and caution about the quality and quantity of meats and drinks, about air, sleep, exercise, seasons of the year, purgations, blood-letting and the like, . . . as bring men into a labyrinth of care in the observation, and unto perfect slavery in the endeavoring to perform what they do in this matter enjoin." Bacon does his spiriting rather more delicately: "Physicians are some of them so pleasing and conformable to the humor of the patient, as they press not the true cure of the disease; and some others are so regular in proceeding according to art for the disease, as they respect not sufficiently the condition of the patient."

It is clear that with the wise men of old quantity rather than quality was the ruling law; not what a man ate, but how much he ate was the capital thing for him to consider. A tolerably simple diet is advised, though the wise Lessius holds that the quality of the food matters little, so that the man be healthy; but whatever it be, let there be moderation; measure is the one thing needful. The difficulty of finding this measure is confessed: "Lust knows not," says St. Augustine, "where necessity ends." By the time he had reached his