J. F. BROCK 
experience of health and his resistance to most forms of disease. 
The concept can be extended to cover many other aspects of 
man’s ‘‘wholeness’’. We can talk about his intellectual, his 
psychic, and his emotional constitution. All are long-term 
products of inheritance and environment. All are of great 
relevance tomany aspects ofthissymposium. I shall, however, be 
confining my consideration largely to ‘“‘ physical constitution”’. 
In a later section I shall be tracing the important effects 
of habitual dietary pattern on physical constitution. 
DIETS 
Dietetic restrictions and taboos are very evident in the Bible 
and other ancient writings, including those of pre-Hippocratic 
Greece. Some of these had relevance to the hygiene of their 
day, and still have relevance in some twentieth century under- 
developed communities. 
The beginnings of a naturalistic approach to the subject are 
seen in two of the Hippocratic treatises—A Regimen for Health 
and Tradition in Medicine. Subsequently, considerable attention 
was given to diet as a factor in health promotion by the ancient 
physicians. Galen dealt with dietetic aspects of longevity, 
a theme which is repeatedly encountered in Byzantine and 
medieval Arabic writings. During the Renaissance, following 
Luigi Cornaro’s Discourses on a Temperate Life, the doctrine of 
dietary discretion as a means of prolonging life became well- 
established. 
The profession of dietetics has developed in the twentieth 
century out of the science of human nutrition. Therapeutic 
dietetics has remained within medical control, the dietitian 
merely constructing and supplying certain diets on principles 
laid down by practising doctors. Health-promotive dietetics 
has become the province of a multiplicity of nutrition autho- 
rities in consultation with the medical profession and has 
been developed on an international scale by the World Health 
and Food and Agriculture Organizations of the United Nations. 
Both therapeutic and preventive dietetics have, under the 
influence of twentieth-century science, become sophisticated 
in the sense defined. 
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