The biggest challenges in public health today are often related to attitudes, diet and exercise. In many ways, this marks a return to the state of medicine in the eighteenth century, when ideals of healthy living were a much more central part of the European consciousness than they have become since the advent of modern clinical medicine. Enlightenment advice on healthy lifestyle was often still discussed in terms of the six non-naturals – airs and places, food and drink, exercise, excretion and retention, and sleep and emotions. This volume examines what it meant to live healthily in...

The history and philosophy of scientific ideas and the role poiēsis and imagination play in our understanding of science and progress are widely explored in this book. By examining the views of William Blake and other poets in the context of twentieth-century philosophers Hannah Arendt, Jacob Bronowski, Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour and Karl Popper, amongst others, the book takes an eclectic approach drawing on examples from biology, history, literature, philosophy and economics, arguing for the reestablishment of imagination as a central attribute of science that may help to...