SUMMARY

Advice on how to live healthily and prolong life aroused great interest amongst the literate public, if the numbers of books devoted to the subject are anything to go by. They were addressed to the middling and upper sections of society, and did not claim, as did works on therapeutics, to be necessary for everyone. Moreover, despite the interest in prevention, it was widely acknowledged that few took up the advice, a paradox that is still present today. Preventive medicine was therefore limited in its ostensible scope; it was, in a sense, the luxury end of medicine. It provided for a choice of diet and lifestyles for those who had the means to make choices that were not so available to the poor; for instance, whether to eat meat and vegetables. But it was also an important part of medical and surgical treatment, for rules on diet, exercise, etc. were relevant for the ill as well as the healthy. It was also one of the primary means whereby the principles and ethos of learned medicine were spread to the literate part of the population, thus helping to create a unified medical culture, with lay writers in turn also taking part in this process. Medical knowledge about health was transferred to readers who were expected then to apply it to themselves.