Medical Sports Fitness: An Ancient Parody of Greek Medicine

^Medical Sports Fitness: An Ancient Parody of Greek Medicine* Robert Brophy and Mary O'Reilly Brophy Cynics point out two ways to tell that an idea or field has arrived: by counting the dollars spent or weighing the paper wasted on it, especially in journals devoted exclusively to it. By these criteria, medical sports fitness, the allegedly scientific study of the attainment of health through physical activity, has arrived in the United States. As of 1985, Americans spent almost half a billion dollars a year on personal gymnasium equipment and three billion for "fitness-related footwear and clothing."1 In addition, 7,500 organized health clubs or gyms and tens of thousands of teams in every sport helped create the "leisure and fitness boom," which has been labeled "over a 300 billion dollar industry and still growing."2 A partial list of journals devoted to the field includes the following: Australian Journal of Sports Medicine; British Journal of Sports Medicine ; American Journal of Sports Medicine; Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness; Sports Medicine: An International Journal of Applied Medical Science in Sport and Fitness; Home and Gym Fitness; American Health (formerly American Health and Fitness). Inevitably, such increased devotion of time and money to exercise stimulates desires for peak performance, health, and fitness, but also increases injuries. In addition, it provokes controversy about who the true expert is: the Western medical-scientific expert or the specialist in varied sports—the coach, trainer, yogi, guru, black belt. Charlatans exist, of course, but most of these specialists have a valid claim to expertise. * The translations and prehminary research that went into this paper were funded by two grants, one from the National Institutes of Health History of Medicine Translation section, Grant LM03699; and the other a Hendricks Grant from the Research Foundation of Syracuse University and SUNY Health Science Center at Syracuse. We are grateful for both, and hope to have the first complete translations of Philostratus's Gymnastic and Oribasius's Collectio Medica, Books 1-6, published by SUNY Press. Literature and Medicine 8 (1989) 156-65 © 1989 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Robert Brophy and Mary O'ReUly Brophy 157 Within medicine itself, awareness is growing of the need for positive as well as negative medicine, that is, of the need to promote health and fitness, not only to prevent and cure illness and trauma. Medical debates about the primary role of the physician, the promotion of health versus the treatment of disease, and the nature of the "true" expert, are as old as Western medicine. Some 2,400 years ago Hippocrates devoted several works to these topics. For the next eight centuries, from before 400 b.c. to after a.D. 400, these topics continued to be important features of Greek medicine. Intellectual debates about them were lively in the times of Galen (a.d. 130-200) and Oribasius (a.d. 330-99), physician to Julian "the Apostate" and several Christian emperors . Oribasius's Synagogai Iatrikai or Medical Collections is the third great corpus of Greek medicine left to us, but it is not well known because modern translations are not available—a situation this paper helps rectify.3 Galen and Oribasius devoted whole treatises or subtreatises to these disputes . Examples of this genre are Oribasius's Collections, Book 6, and Galen's Hygiene or Maintenance of Health and Thrasybulus or Whether Health Is Part of Medicine or Gymnastic.4, The controversy, for the ancient Greeks, centered on whether the "gymnast" (the coach and trainer for the Greek games) or the physician was the true expert for producing ideal fitness and health. Claims and counterclaims were made so often that parodies of each side appeared. (Humor, good-natured or biting, at the expense of an idea or field is a third sure sign that it has arrived.) One parody mocking the claims of medical expertise in this field was written by Philostratus, a younger acquaintance of Galen's in the Second Sophistic, the circle of pagan intellectuals that grew around the Empress Julia Domna and the Severan Dynasty (a.d. 193-235). Philostratus's Gymnastic was written to praise the ideal Olympic athlete, the noblest model of...