OBESITY continued...<< 1  2  3  4  endnotes >>
Roberta J. Park

JAN COMENIUS AND OTHERS “PUT WORDS INTO ACTION”

Books, treatises, and other means of advocacy can be very important. However, unless words are put into practice it is not likely that health will improve. This is a fact that merits attention today no less than it did in the mid-1600s when Polish immigrant Samuel Hartlib petitioned Parliament to bring Jan Amos Comenius (author of The Great Didactic and School of Infancy) to England in the hope of creating universal system of education provided by the State.²² During the 1700s growing numbers of men--and women--in France, Germany, Switzerland, and elsewhere created opportunities for children to engage in play and exercise. The contributions of Guts Muths and Pestalozzi usually are noted in our standard textbooks. There were others. The French physician Jean Verdier (whose “maison d’éducation” included exercise and games for boys and girls), for example, and the Countess de Genlis (who took the action necessary to ensure that the children of the Duc D’Orleans would have ample physical activity).²³ The eighteenth century also set the stage for the sanitary movements of the 1800s. These led to the establishment of England’s 1872 Public Health Law and founding of organizations like the American Public Health Association (1872).²⁴

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BEGINS

In 1816 English physician William Wadd had published Cursory Remarks on Corpulence or Obesity Considered as a Disease. In his more extensive 1829 book, Comments on Corpulence, Wadd wrote: The “four ordinary secrets of health” are early rising, exercise, personal cleanliness, and leaving the table before becoming full.²⁵ Invoking observations made by Hippocrates, Plato and other authors of antiquity as well as comments that King Edward IV presumably made in 1475 about the problems of corpulent London aldermen, he set forth eleven cases involving men—and one of a woman. Case I stated: “from earliest childhood I was more inclined to read than to play” and was “totally unskilled in all boyish amusements.” As he approached his thirtieth year the man experienced “great inconvenience” from his increasing bulk. He tried a diet of “animal food,” no vegetables, and plenty of drink but his complaints increased. He then took to a vegetable diet (with some ale, brandy, and water) but did not become thinner. When he reduced the quantity of food he became thinner but “little capable of exercise.” Wadd attributed the problem to the fact that the man had been as “intemperate in fasting” as he had been in feasting. (Apparently, after losing twenty-eight pounds in three weeks he had gone on “a violent outrage” to his stomach and eaten “all kinds of improper things.”)²⁶

Case II involved a “Fat Sportsman” who exercised extensively in the morning then rewarded his labors by eating, drinking, and sleeping in the afternoon. His weight increased from 210 lbs (fifteen stone) to 266 lbs (nineteen stone). The increase interfered with his ability to engage in sports or find a horse strong enough to carry him. Wadd, who noted that the majority of those who try to lose weight “inquire for pills,” was not sympathetic to the man’s request for pills to counter the two gallons of strong ale that he drank every day.²⁷ The book’s brief final section opens with an observation is all to prevalent today: “There are many who think, if they keep a doctor in pay, they may do as they please.” (Which means—If we make the doctor responsible for our health we think that we are freed of responsibility and can “eat and drink” as we wish.)²⁸

British physician Thomas Graham’s Sure Methods of Improving Health and Prolonging Life (1828), likewise, cautioned readers about the dangers of overeating.²⁹ Within the “last few years,” he was pleased to say, gymnastic exercises had received more attention; however, the public remained largely uninformed regarding their value.³⁰ His case VI involved a rich young man of twenty-five who became very corpulent and suffered a severe case of gout. He then began an exercise regimen of several hours of a week (tennis, walking, hunting, and other activities). At the end of eighteen months what Graham called this “misshapen mass” had become a “well-made an vigorous man” who enjoyed perfect health.³¹

Concerned that students Amherst College ate and drank too much and neglected exercise, in spring 1830 Edward Hitchcock, who would become the College’s third president (1845-1854) and was the father of the man would become Director of Amherst’s Department of Physical Culture in 1861, prepared for them a series of lectures on diet and regimen. Published as Dyspepsy Forstalled (1830), these were praised by the Journal of Health and other contemporary publications. In Part I (which is concerned with “diet”) Hitchcock repeatedly warns the reader about the problems of excess, citing problems incurred by Cheyne and others who overindulged. Not only were people prone to find excuses for overeating, few had any knowledge of the bad effects.³² Part II (Regimen) is concerned with different aspects of exercise—Hitchcock recommends for the students three to four hours spread throughout the day. It, too, opens with an observations that seems as much needed today as it was one hundred and seventy-eight years ago: “[D]iet alone, however rigid, will not avail as a substitute for exercise.”³³

We do not know to what extent Hitchcock may have encouraged William Augustus Stearns, who followed him as Amherst’s President, to establish in 1860 the first department of physical culture to be directed by a medical man. The few presumptive “departments” that already existed were headed by military men or athletes. The younger Hitchcock, who had graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1853, replaced John Worthington Hooker when Hooker resigned for health reasons in 1861.³⁴ Both the Amherst program and the younger Hitchcock, who became the first president of the Association for the Advancement of Physical Education upon its founding in 1885, were significant forces in the creation of our profession. One of several reasons was the fact that Hitchcock “put words into action” and created a required program of exercises for all Amherst students. He was not alone! Although our profession has met with many obstacles, it would serve us well to be better informed about what it had accomplished by the year of its centenary - 1985.

Cartesian beliefs about the supremacy of “mind” over “body” continue today; and everyone presumes to know (which they do not!) what “physical education” is all about. It is imperative that the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance do a better job of asserting itself, take the actions that are necessary to return quality physical education to schools, and help to built the types of quality community recreation programs for young people that existed into the 1960s.³⁵

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