KINESIPATHY. — LING. 387 



ranks among the most important means of removing chronic symp- 

 toms of disease. 



For the modern development of artificial analytical exercise, as 

 applied to the treatment of disease, we are indebted to Ling, the 

 Swedish poet, whose system has now been practised with success 

 for more than thirty years in his own country. This Ling was a 

 stern but versatile genius, worthy of the Scandinavian name — 

 worthy of the land of Eddas, Sagas, Gustavuses, the world's best 

 iron, and its Swedenborg. He had read in the ancient lore of his 

 country the record of a mental and bodily prowess of uncommon 

 virtue ; the doings of kings, Jarls and vikings in the olden time, 

 when the sea rovers sallied forth with the summer, and astonished 

 the effeminacy of the known world with their strong arms. And 

 the thought occurred to him, that it was possible by knowledge well 

 directed in practice, to combine the muscles of ancient heroism 

 with the civilization of to-day, and in the physical frames of his 

 Swedes, to re-enact the days of Snorro and Hakon Jarl in those of 

 the fourteenth Charles. In short, taking his cue from classic 

 Greece, he sought, by gymnastic exercises, to compensate for the 

 bent backs and dwindled muscles that modern pursuits and com- 

 mon-place existence have produced. He stood in the age like a 

 kind of human Hecla, reminiscent of the valor of a thousand years, 

 and pouring forth a flood of incentives to his race, to emulate the 

 strength of their sires. His verse breathes with a Homeric spirit 

 of combat, with a delight in the good science of the strokes, as well 

 as in the death of the foe. It has the harshness and boldness of a 

 muscular rhyme. His harp was " strung with bears' sinews/' 

 But it is not with his gymnastics in general that we can meddle, 

 but only with their medical part : we have touched on the other, 

 because the subject is less known than it deserves to be in England, 

 and our sign post may direct the curious on its way. 



It is told of Ling that, when a youth, on one occasion he was 

 weary of life, and like a bad boy he wandered slowly on a biting 

 winter day, as thinly clad as possible, half a Swedish mile into the 

 country, in the hope of catching a chill which would terminate his 

 existence, without his being guilty of the immediate sin of suicide. 

 He, however, only took a common cold in the head, which led him 



