Wellbeing: a cultural history of healthy living

Introduction Prologue: The Ancient Advanced Civilizations - Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia

Greece

The ideal of health in ancient Greece

The Presocratics

The Hippocratic corpus

Diodes of Carystus, a fourth-century health pedagogue

'Knidic' dietetics

Health in Plato and Aristotle

Dietetics in Alexandria

Cures and miracles, Aesculapius and Hygieia

Public health care and sport

Early Stoics and Cynics

Rome

People and literati: dietetics in ancient Rome

New doctors, new theories

Sport and baths

The sacred tales of Publius Aelius Aristides

The Roman Stoics: Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus

Galen

Jewish and Early Christian Traditions

Jewish doctrines of health

Christus medicus

Early Christian doctrines of health

Medieval Traditions in the East and West

Healing and health in early monasticism

The first German pharmacopoeia

Dietetics in Islam

Medieval doctrines of health in the West

Asceticism and mysticism - feasts and beauty care

Western and Eastern clerical scholars: Maimonides, Petrus Hispanus, Roger Bacon

Hildegard of Bingen

Saints and miracle workers

The power of the stars

Doctrines of Health in the Renaissance

Petrarch's conception of health

Alberti and other intellectuals around 1500

House books and manuals - health and literature

Further humanists - Platina, More, Luther

Philosophy of health and prophylaxis in Venice - Mercuriale, Rangone, Cornaro

Gabriele Zerbi and the Gerontocomia

Paracelsus' teachings on health

Herbal books

Dietetics in daily life

Dietetics in the Seventeenth Century

Cartesianism and conservative tendencies

Van Helmont, Sylvius and other 'iatrochemists'

Doctrines of health in England - the dietetics of the state

Health through planning - the utopias

The dietetics of the Enlightenment - philosophers, pedagogues, charlatans

Doctrines of Health in the Eighteenth Century

Medical theories of health

The French Enlightenment and Rousseau

Tissot, Triller, Mai: health education at grassroots

Public health care

Around 1800

The notion of 'Lebenskraft' (vital force) - Hufeland and Kant

The recurrent topic of a dietetic regime for intellectuals

Alternative paths to health

Goethe

Romantic medicine - Schelling, Carus, Novalis

The Nineteenth Century

Trends in the nineteenth century

Rudolf Virchow and the dietetics of reason

Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the philosophical critique of positivism

The revolution in nutrition and alternative paths to health

Afterword