As MPs prepare yet another raft of vital legislation relating to killer dogs, no, sorry, gun-control, no, ah yes, of course, the obesity ‘epidemic’ (or was it anorexia? no, that was a year or so back), they might do well to read what Plutarch (c.ad 110) has to say on the general issue.
In one of his ‘Table Talks’, Plutarch and friends are trying to work out whether brand new diseases could come into the world — as some doctors claimed — and if so, how: from other worlds, or what? The general conclusion reached is that, just as the facts of any case might allow one true statement to be made, but an infinite number of false ones, so nature, representing order and all that is good, can be knocked out of kilter and thus generate disease by the sheer number of combinations of circumstances that are possible (and here, by way of analogy, Plutarch quotes Xenocrates’ calculation that the number of syllables that the letters of the alphabet could in theory make comes to 1,002,000,000,000).
To prove his point, Plutarch goes on to enumerate examples of individual phenomena that have never occurred before or since: a friend at Athens who emitted a large amount of semen with ‘a hairy creature, which scuttled along at speed on many legs’; and the grandmother who hibernated for two months every year ‘giving no sign of life except that she breathed’. According to the doctor Meno, liver disease was indicated when the patient stayed on the lookout for mice in order to chase them off — ‘a phenomenon observed nowhere nowadays’.
The most likely explanations for all this, Plutarch concludes, are diet, especially the introduction of new exotic luxury foods and combinations of foods from all over the empire, and bathing habits, where the body, once gently pampered in the baths, was now plunged from hot to cold and back again.
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