Playing Scrabble, I encountered the Scottish word "sonsy,"* meaning plump and buxom, which comes from the Gaelic for "good fortune."
That triggered me to look up the history of obesity, formerly associated with opulence and success in the middle ages, yet now more shameful. It turns out that obesity has undergone vicissitudes from aspiration to derision. Even Hippocrates knew that exercise was the antidote to the ills of obesity. Here are some excerpts from an article:
"The history of obesity includes a variety of tribal customs, such as fattening up young girls and women to make them more desirable...."
"figurines, dated to about 25,000 B.C....Some have theorized that it represented a fertility symbol, an idolization of beauty or desirability, an object of worship or a totem for good fortune."
"However, the Old Testament, the New Testament, early Christian writings and the Talmud regard obesity negatively... Proverbs 23:20: "Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat.""
"The recognition that obesity was an impediment to good health and longevity is documented in the writings of ancient Greece, Egypt and India."
"It is very injurious to health to take in more food than the constitution will bear when, at the same time one uses no exercise to carry off this excess. ..."(Hippocratic Corpus)."
"Hindu physicians... noted in the second century B.C. that black ants were attracted to "honey urine." [presumably diabetes] Hippocrates stated: "Corpulency is not only a disease, but the harbinger of others. Those who are constitutionally very fat are more apt to die quickly than those who are thin""
"After the fall of Rome...scholarship [was] confined to monk archivists...medicine lagged behind, and the conceptualization that obesity was in essence a malignancy ceased to be recognized. In certain societies, obesity was often considered a privilege of the upper classes. In fact, it was obviously considered beautiful, as the Rubenesque obese female nudes demonstrated."
*The Scrabble word was actually "sonsier," since in Scrabble you're often trying to use up the letter "i."
No comments:
Post a Comment