Just as runners must take care of their legs, what should people of letters take care of?

BarcelonaSince ancient times, treatises on health have been frequently read, including a very specific aspect of the subject, the health of the people who study it. As for the bibliography of this particular aspect, it is worth remembering the book by David Tissot, Of the santé des gens de lettres, which we read in the Lausanne edition of 1775. It is clear from the date of publication that Tissot's advice had to be welcomed in an era, the Age of Enlightenment, in which men and women of letters and study proliferated. Since study is a sedentary activity, Tissot made a series of recommendations in his book, some very sensible, others very fanciful, in the absence of a more perfect development of the health sciences.

It should not be surprising either that Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), one of the great humanists of the Renaissance, a man of multiple knowledge, a neoplatonist to the core, dedicated a fairly extensive pamphlet to the same subject: To preserve the health of scholars, first part of From life book three (1489), which can be read in French at Arthème Fayard, 2000.

It was a time when the rediscovery of much classical literature, in Greek and Latin, aroused among scholars the itch to know better a world that had remained half hidden throughout the Middle Ages. Constantinople having fallen in 1453, and many Byzantine scholars having gone into exile in Italy, everything was ready for European scholars to learn Greek, the mother language of the then-stagnant Latin they still knew.

Ficino says that, just as runners must take care of their legs, people of letters must take care of these four things: the brain, the heart, the liver and the stomach. Apart from this, the scholar must take care of the pituitary gland because, according to a very old tradition, in this organ resides the "black humour", due to melancholy. Ficino advised some material remedies (few, because he was a Platonist) against the melancholy that was common among studious people. He said that it was advisable to be chaste, because the act of venere was a "monster" that exhausted the spirit, weakened the brain, spoiled the stomach and spoiled the "noble parts." Drinking was also a bad thing for this kind of people, as was—this still happens a lot—for scholars to work at night and sleep during the day, because the sun, like Venus and Mercury, favors eloquence.

It is even stranger that he advised combing one's hair only with an ivory comb, taking lots of nutmeg, saffron and ginger (like Bartleby, the character in Herman Melville). And like this, there are more things that the reader, if he is dedicated to literature, will read with delight in that book.