The idea of preventing disease certainly makes sense. Hippocrates had the right idea and intuitively knew that by maintaining the nervous system function at its highest levels patients would be well more often than they were ill. That is not to say that illness would be staved off 100% of the time. It is necessary for our bodies to be stressed in order to keep our bodies agile and ready for the challenges we are put to from time to time.
Wellness has been an idea that has come and gone throughout the centuries. In ancient Rome cleanliness was encouraged while sewage systems kept human waste from accumulating in the streets preventing diseases of filth from ravaging the population. Neither did the Romans dump their sewage into rivers or active water ways because they knew that the health of their waterways was vital to the strength of their empire.
Not only did they divert their waste away from water ways they created evaporation ponds that would both store and disinfect the waste which they would then use as fertilizer on their vineyards. Recycling?
Even Garbage collection was scheduled and littering fined. If you didn't have the money to pay the fine you were flogged. As a result Rome had very clean streets. They even had an agency that saw to it that nobody sold tainted food to the people of Rome. So how is it that such contemporary common sense ideas died out?
The Roman empire did endure for well over a thousand years so they obviously did something right. But when the empire crumbled social hygiene fell to the wayside as hordes of barbarians overran the cities and left behind them wreckage and ruin. What rose out of the ashes was a new order where religion dictated policy declaring anything of Roman origin evil and where disease was Gods punishment for sin and knowledge discouraged. Anyone who dared question authority was accused of witchcraft or devil worship then burned at the stake. Galeleo dared to question the Churches position that the earth was the center of our universe and that the earth rotated around the sun, not the other way around. For this he was threatened with death via burning at the stake. We know today that he was correct. Sadly we lost nearly a thousand years of potential geniuses due to this atmosphere of fear and oppression.
What did rise from this time of ignorance was demonology or the study of demon possession. It was theorized that illness was caused by the possession by an evil demon and the only way to 'cure' the person of this illness was to bleed them and purify their body. As the centuries marched on the 'demon' morphed into the germ hence the germ theory we know today. Yet, the treatment for this neo-demon possession didn't change. Blood letting was the staple of the medical field for nearly a thousand years. This was the earliest form if 'sick care' or treating of the body 'after' the damage was done. Sadly most of the diseases that ravaged Europe could have been prevented had they simply used the roman system of waste disposal and sewage systems.
Historical note: Did you know that the Palace of King Louis and Marie Antoinette did not even have a single toilet? During the many balls and parties that were held there and the dinner and wine that was consumed holding your bodily functions in check wasn't going to happen. Clearly the garden would have come into some use but the guests would usually use the stair wells for 'both' duties of bodily function. Ewwwww!! To quote my daughter.
Is it any wonder that Europe suffered through so many different epidemics and plagues? It was only after the first 'Crapper' was in regular use that the diseases that were so prominent in our society began to ease up. "Crapper" was a brand name for a toilet, hence the slang term we use today. After nearly 2000 years we began to use the same technology that the Romans did to keep their streets clean.
I often wonder how our society would have developed had we incorporated cleanliness into our society rather than forsaken it out of religious dogma. Would the famines and epidemics that plagued ancient Europe have ever happened? Would the Black Plague have ever been? How in the name of sanity and logic did we survive the dark ages? What did we lose as a result? We can only speculate the answers to these questions, learn and move forward as we each learn how to obtain wellness and live in the wellness life style and hope we never lose the knowledge we have gained for the sake of dogmatic ideology. One can only hope because we might not be so lucky as to survive such stupidity again.
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