The health benefits of a good diet, exercise, and avoidance of tobacco are much discussed today. London in the days before the Plague and the Great Fire is perhaps not the first place that comes to mind to find early theories regarding diet, but it is precisely there that many ideas we take for granted today were published in James Hart's Klinike. The book is one of the first to cover these topics from this perspective, and includes a wealth of fascinating discourses on the effects of "good" diet versus the "diet of the diseased." Many of these discussions are well-established in the mainstream today, although some of the topics, such as an index entry for "Youth made to lie upon the ground, to accustome that age to hardship" might seem quaint by current standards. Most notable is a section devoted to the use of tobacco and its harmful effects where Hart advocates a good diet and moderate exercise as "farre better than all the tabacco of Trinidad."

Hart's book is interesting not just for its enlightened view of a healthy lifestyle. Hart was a passionate opponent of the practice of members of the clergy acting as physicians, without any training or knowledge of medicine. He felt so strongly about this topic that he wrote a lengthy text devoted to it, only to have it denied a license to be printed by the Stationers' Company, the organization that controlled printing presses in England. Two copies are known to exist, published scribally (as handwritten manuscripts) to avoid censure. But Hart wasn't to be discouraged. Nine years later, as Klinike was being prepared for the press, he inserted passages from his text about the clergy into its introduction. He effectively smuggled his more controversial ideas about the church into publication by disguising them in an unrelated text, which is suitably well-known today for the medical ideas it contains, while the clergy controversy has long since passed into history.

The Ebling Library Copy (WZ 250 H325K 1633)

Our copy of Klinike features a substantial piece of binder's waste. This gathering from an earlier book, a fifteenth-century work judging by the typography, was torn from the original and used to support the binding. Further leaves are barely visible underneath the paste-downs, the pages attached to the boards of the covers, at the front and back of the book. This particular example of binder's waste features the earlier text perpendicular to the new, unfolded from its original arrangement.

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