“The Parent of Health and Long Life”. Food and the Popularization of Learned Medicine in Late-seventeenth-century England

Although newer approaches, including the Paracelsian one, also started to gain more prominence, late-seventeenth-century medicine was still largely based upon the Hippocratic-Galenic system, where the relationship between nutrition, health and well-being occupied a prominent position. Indeed, food was included among Galen’s six “non-naturals”, that is, the activities that need to be regulated to balance the humors in the body and, consequently, to preserve (and in some cases also restore) health. Moreover, the distinction between food and drug was only pragmatic, as, because of their therapeutic properties, several kinds of foodstuff also appear among the simples and in the ingredients lists of compound remedies in all materia medica and receptaria. Following the methodology of Historical Discourse Analysis, the paper investigates how the relationship between food and well-being was presented and represented in a corpus of general medical handbooks that were translated from Latin into English in the late seventeenth century with the purpose of rendering learned medical notions accessible to a wider English-speaking audience, thus shedding light on dominant discourses on food and nutrition and their role in the promotion of well-being in early modern medicine.