A Healthy Interest: diets, exercise, and ideal bodies in England and Holland, 1650-1800. (360G-Wellcome-212622_Z_18_Z)

My thesis will analyse diet and exercise advice and practices to investigate attitudes to ‘healthy bodies’ in Dutch and English printed medical literature, physician’s casebooks, patient-physician correspondence, and recipe books between 1650 and 1800. With modern concerns around increasing obesity rates and an ever-growing body of dietary advice in both medical and popular literature, a study of diets and exercise in the past can help us understand where our current ideas and ideals concerning body and health originate. The key goals of this project are to locate the health values and practices that were being promoted at this time; to assess to what extent dietary advice and ideals reached lay society; to analyse to what extent patients followed advice and made dietary and exercise considerations part of their ‘lifestyle’; and to examine attitudes to ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ bodies and bodily ideals in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch and English society. Examining manuscript and printed sources in a geographically comparative study will provide a rich and in-depth understanding of contemporary ‘health cultures’ and bodily ideals. In so doing the thesis will analyse how far we can identify the development of a modern ‘health culture’ in this period.