Flesh in the Age of Reason (19 page)

Smoothing rough edges, Addison and Steele aspired to turn belligerent and vituperative antagonists into politically correct coffee-house conversationalists, and (respecting the fair sex) giddy
fashion-mad flirts into sensible, well-informed creatures, who would grace their husbands and instruct their children. The strife and sorrow of old were not the inescapable legacies of Original Sin; they were self-inflicted and corrigible: ‘Half the Misery of Human Life might be extinguished, would Men alleviate the general Curse they lie under, by mutual Offices of Compassion, Benevolence and Humanity.’ The physician in Mr Spectator aimed to heal the disastrous ruptures of the ‘divided society’, those estranging Whigs and Tories, High and Low Church, town and country, gentry and commerce, men and women, by means of the creation of agreeable, conformist social actors. And complementing that call to social discipline, Mr Spectator also addressed another aspect of the human condition in need of remedy, the body itself, its nature and culture. The
Spectator
club was to be a coming together of gentlemen from all walks of life in happy harmony.

The human physique was glorious, declared Mr Spectator, and its Maker to be venerated. Even the pagan Galen ‘could not but own a Supreme Being upon a Survey of this his Handywork’, while ‘since the Circulation of the Blood has been found out, and many other great Discoveries have been made by our Modern Anatomists, we see new Wonders in the Human Frame’. Attention was drawn to features of the body – the symmetry of eyes and ears, hands and feet, for instance – which optimized its functioning and served as sublime proofs of the Supreme Designer: ‘Is it possible for Chance to be thus delicate and uniform in her Operations?’ For further proof, readers were directed to that contemporary work of scientific popularization, Sir Richard Blackmore’s didactic epic poem
Creation
(1712), ‘where the Anatomy of the human Body is described with Great Perspicuity and Elegance’. ‘Know yourself’ included knowing your body. Handsome, harmonious, durable, adaptable to all needs and capable of self-repair, man’s flesh and blood was in itself a hymn of praise to the Great Original.

How absurd, then, that through gluttony, drunkenness, luxury, ignorance, neglect and myriad other acts of commission and omission, God-given bodies were so abused. Commending moderation
and temperance, a handful of
Spectator
papers were given over to correcting this deplorable situation. An inspiration to all should be the renowned Renaissance longevist, Luigi Cornaro, whose tale was told.

By the age of 35, this sixteenth-century Paduan nobleman found his physical constitution on the brink of ruin through sensual overindulgence. Such desperate circumstances drove him to embrace a temperate life, and he rapidly recovered in what proved to be a quasi-religious conversion. Eventually, at the ripe old age of 83, he composed his
Discourse on the Temperate Life
(1550), which propounded his regimen of health; a second discourse was added at the age of 86, a third at 91 and a fourth at 95.

Despite his advanced years, insisted Cornaro, his senses remained tiptop; his teeth were well preserved, he could easily climb stairs and even mount his horse unaided. He waxed lyrical over the joys of life, his love of reading and writing, his discussions with scholars and artists, and, dearest to his heart, the company of his grandchildren.

The secret lay in dietary temperance. As one grew older, food intake had to be reduced, because ‘natural heat’ decreased in the elderly. In time, his diet came to consist of morsels of meat, bread and egg broth. ‘I always eat with relish’, he claimed, and ‘I feel, when I leave the table, that I must sing.’ The nobleman confidently predicted the extension of man’s lifespan beyond the biblical ‘three score and ten’. All could live to 100, while those blessed with a robust constitution could aspire to 120. The fact that this paragon of health passed away prematurely in 1565, at the disappointing age of 98, did not prevent the
Spectator
from holding him up as a shining example of man’s power to take charge of his body and make it subserve the end of the good life – indeed it erroneously claimed he had lived to beyond 100. Cornaro’s treatise, purred Addison, ‘is written with such a Spirit of Cheerfulness, Religion, and good Sense, as are the natural Concomitants of Temperance and Sobriety. The mixture of the old Man in it is rather a Recommendation than a Discredit to it.’ Go, and do thou likewise.

Excess was one of the
Spectator
’s great complaints – eat only one
dish at a meal, avoid lavish sauces, do not gormandize. It also praised bodily hygiene, offering ‘hints upon
Cleanliness
, which I shall consider as one of the
Half-Virtues
, as
Aristotle
calls them’. And, endorsing that drive towards stricter bodily control then so conspicuous, it commended propriety and sensitivity in physical comportment. A reader’s letter – real or fabricated, who can say? – raised such sensitive issues: ‘It is my Misfortune’, opened the correspondent,

to be in Love with a young Creature who is daily committing Faults… [she] either wholly neglects, or has no Notion of that which Polite People have agreed to distinguish by the Name of
Delicacy
. After our Return from a Walk, the other Day, she threw her self into an Elbow Chair, and professed before a large Company, that
she was all over in a Sweat
. She told me this Afternoon that her
Stomach aked
; and was complaining yesterday at Dinner of something that
stuck in her Teeth
.

What was to be done? The joke was clearly equally on this insufferable hoyden and on the letter-writer for being such a wimp as to put up with her.

In pursuit of the well-tempered body, the
Spectator
made much of the need for physical exercise, grounding its advice on the lessons of the new mechanical philosophy – humoralist medicine was evidently pretty passé. ‘I consider the Body as a System of Tubes and Glands,’ declared Addison,

or to use a mere Rustick Phrase, a Bundle of Pipes and Strainers, fitted to one another after so wonderful a manner as to make a proper Engine for the Soul to work with. This Description does not only comprehend the Bowels, Bones, Tendons, Veins, Nerves and Arteries, but every Muscle and every Ligature, which is a Composition of Fibres, that are so many imperceptible Tubes or Pipes interwoven on all sides with invisible Glands or Strainers.

Once accept that the body was a machine, and was it not plain as a pikestaff that it should not be allowed to rust or seize up through disuse? ‘There must be frequent Motions and Agitations, to mix, digest, and separate the Juices contained in it, as well as to clear and
cleanse that Infinitude of Pipes and Strainers of which it is composed.’ Exactly as it commended social energy, the
Spectator
likewise held that physical activity was a prophylactic against weakness and lethargy.

And just as it sought to harmonize male and female, land and trade, town and country, so as to restore social health, so too the cooperation of body and mind was vital to create and sustain personal well-being. Man being ‘a Compound of Soul and Body’,
mens sana in corpore sano
was the watchword, and this required that animation without which, taught Addison, ‘the Body cannot subsist in its Vigour, nor the Soul act with Chearfulness’. Activity in the somatic economy pepped up ‘all the Faculties of the Mind, by keeping the Understanding clear, the Imagination untroubled, and refining those Spirits that are necessary for the proper Exertion of our intellectual Faculties’. Neglect this, and what was the result? ‘The Spleen’ – a disorder ‘frequent in Men of studious and sedentary Tempers, as well as the Vapours to which those of the other Sex are so often subject’.

A life of leisure (
otium
) might seem enviable, but the idle rich – ‘those who are not obliged to Labour, by the Condition in which they are born’ – often suffered for lack of exercise and would become ‘more miserable than the rest of Mankind, unless they indulge themselves in the voluntary Labour which goes by the Name of Exercise’. Addison and Steele were no slavish advocates of the Protestant Work-ethic, fetishizing labour in and for itself, but they did endorse spirited exertion.

Hunting formed particularly valuable exercise; and one of the members of the
Spectator
club, Sir Roger de Coverley, was applauded for his pursuit of the chase. ‘My Friend Sir R
OGER
’, declared Mr Spectator,

has been an indefatigable Man in Business of this kind, and has hung several Parts of his House with the Trophies of his former Labours. The Walls of his great Hall are covered with the Horns of several kinds of Deer that he has killed in the Chace, which he thinks the most valuable Furniture of his House, as they afford him frequent Topicks of Discourse, and shew that he has not been Idle –

though a sentimental aside noted that the humane Sir Roger – anticipating Sterne’s Uncle Toby? – could not bear to kill the prey he loved to hunt but kept them in a kind of retirement park. This form of ‘labour’, Addison noted, had the approval of the ‘English Hippocrates’, Dr Thomas Sydenham; and, he further insisted, ‘that those Parts of the World are the most healthy, where they subsist by the Chace’. Drawing what became a familiar primitivist moral, he ruefully noted that ‘Men lived longest when their Lives were employed in hunting’, whereas town life and the civilizing process brought hazards for health.

So what was the man-about-town to do? Mr Spectator let readers into his personal secret: ‘I exercise my self an Hour every Morning upon a dumb Bell that is placed in a Corner of my Room.’ In his salad days he had even gone in for ‘fighting with a Man’s own Shadow’. This shadow-boxing consisted ‘in the brandishing of two short Sticks grasped in each Hand, and Loaden with Plugs of Lead at either end. This opens the Chest, exercises the Limbs, and gives a Man all the Pleasure of Boxing, without the Blows.’ Shadow-boxing, he sardonically added, might serve social purposes which went well beyond personal fitness: ‘I could wish that several Learned Men would lay out that Time which they employ in Controversies and Disputes about nothing, in
this method
of fighting with their own Shadows. It might conduce very much to evaporate the Spleen.’ The penchant for pugilism we associate with the buccaneering Byron can thus be traced back to the suave Mr Spectator.

Man being this ‘compound of body and soul’, it was necessary to work out, every day, with a ‘double Scheme of Duties’ to achieve fitness: ‘thus employ the one in Labour and Exercise, as well as the other in Study and Contemplation.’ Omit this, abandon yourself to idleness, excess and suchlike follies, and sickness would soon follow. And there lay the slippery slope to dependence upon doctors and medicine. ‘Physick, for the most part,’ pronounced Addison at his most preachy, ‘is nothing else but the Substitute of Exercise or Temperance’ – ‘the Apothecary is perpetually employed in countermining the Cook and the Vintner’. These could be avoided by
smart preventive action: had not Diogenes restrained a young man from going to a feast, saying that he was ‘running into imminent Danger, had not he prevented him’? Today things were far worse: ‘when I behold a Fashionable Table set out in all its Magnificence, I fancy that I see Gouts and Dropsies, Feavers and Lethargies, with other innumerable Distempers lying in Ambuscade among the Dishes.’ Anti-doctor satire was fashionable – Samuel Garth’s cynical
Dispensary
(1699) had just proved a best-seller – and the
Spectator
contributed to disabusing the public: ‘we may lay it down as a Maxim, that when a Nation abounds in Physicians it grows thin of People.’ Physicians, Addison went on, ‘may be described like the
British
Army in
Caesar’s
time: Some of them slay in Chariots, and some on Foot’. The threat of such practitioners was the best health warning of all.

No small contribution to preventive medicine was made by a healthy mind: morbid thinking imperilled the frail corporeal barque; weak minds bred ailing bodies. ‘One of that sickly Tribe who are commonly known by the name of
Valetudinarians
’ confessed to readers how he had ruined his health by bingeing on medical books:

I no sooner began to peruse Books of this Nature, but I found my Pulse, was irregular, and scarce ever read the Account of any Disease that I did not fancy my self afflicted with.
Doctor Sydenham
’s learned Treatise of Fevers threw me into a lingring Hectick, which hung upon me all the while I was reading that excellent Piece.

He then successively read himself into consumption (tuberculosis), gout, gravel and the stone. And a new complication followed, for he had been seduced by ‘that Ingenious Discourse written by
Sanctorius
’.

An associate of Galileo, Santorio Santorio (Latinized as Sanctorius) was an early seventeenth-century pioneer of the new scientific medicine which set special emphasis upon measurement. He developed a thermometer to gauge bodily temperature, and his most influential book,
De Statica Medicina
(On Medical Statics: 1614) recommended other instruments besides – a pendulum for measuring pulse-rate, a hygrometer, a syringe to extract bladder stones and the ‘pulsilogium’, a pulse-watch.

His most ingenious device was the weighing machine or what came to be known as the Sanctorian Balance. Eating, writing and even sleeping in this complicated cage-like wooden contraption, Sanctorius monitored his body functions for some thirty years, documenting alterations in body-weight after dining, evacuating and exercising, and correlating these variables against his state of health. Discovering that the weight of his excreta was less than that of the food and drink he consumed, with no increase in his own weight to account for the difference, he explained the discrepancy in terms of ‘invisible perspiration’, traditionally judged a salutary way of sweating off internal toxins.