Health
Health is commonly thought of as the absence of disease, and indeed it is difficult to discuss one without the other. Equally problematic is the consideration of the health of the body apart from the state of the mind or the spirit, because historically the topics were closely connected, especially before the seventeenth century. Even with these difficulties in mind, it is still possible to focus on certain notions about the health of the human body as a natural state and about how this natural state could be restored or maintained.
One idea about health that unites many cultures, from the classical Indian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, ancient Greek, sub-Saharan African, Semitic, and native American, is the notion that there was a time when the human body existed in a perfect state of health and when no diseases beset it. People lived in harmony with nature, in a childlike state of material plenty and spiritual obedience. Bodily ills came into the world, so many stories go, when a ‘sin’, often one of disobedience, angered divine authority. One thinks of the myth of Pandora's box or the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, as told in Genesis, as examples, but other cultures provide many more such tales. Stories about original sin and the fall from grace are, in short, as common as creation myths in their explanations for why humanity no longer experiences natural health and, in some cases, long physical life.
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