A PHYSICIAN'S VIEW OF EXERCISE AND ATHLETICS.
IN an Eastern fable of prehistoric antiquity, a learned physician is described as having cured the Prince of all the Faithful of a seemingly mortal malady by the use of a pair of clubs, the mysterious virtues of which diffused themselves from the palms of the patient throughout his body and brought renewed health and vigor.
Asclepiades, a Greek physician living in the second century before Christ, cured all ailments, if the account of Pliny may be believed, by the employment of physical exercise alone, and declared his willingness to forfeit all claim to the title of physician if he himself should ever fall sick except from violence or senility. He is said to have justified his assertion by living for more than a century and dying finally from the effects of an accident.
The association thus early recognized in both history and fable between health and longevity on the one hand and physical exercise on the other became a little later an integral part of the creed and the civilization of all the most powerful nations of the world, many of whom owed to its recognition their most brilliant successes in both warlike and artistic pursuits. In Greece, especially, the cultivation of the body by means of gymnastics begun in the earliest life of the individual, fostered and encouraged by the enormous rewards in both fame and riches accruing from success at the Olympic games, and aided by a rigid application of the principles of heredity, eliminating almost completely those persons unfit for the founding or propagating of families, resulted in the nearest approach to physical perfection in an entire people that the world has ever witnessed. Aristotle considered a commonwealth essentially defective if gymnastics were not an integral part of its code, while Plato called him a cripple who, cultivating his mind alone, suffered his body to "languish through sloth and inactivity." The labors of gymnastics, he very truthfully says, if excessive, may make men hard and brutal, but under proper restrictions they stimulate the spiritual element of their nature, make them courageous, and bring their passions under control.
The Greek gymnasia were not only schools for the cultivation of the body, but exerted the greatest influence upon the development of art and upon intellectual progress. The idea ever present to the minds of the Greeks that the first care of life should be the preservation of bodily health, without which all other advantages of mind, of rank, of fortune, became void and ineffective, resulted in the establishment of an
