The Friend of Health, part 5: Moderation

Dr. Samuel Hahnemann would have liked Benjamin Franklin, and the short chapters he wrote for The Friend of Health would have made nice additions to Poor Richard's Almanack. The two men certainly agreed on the topic of moderation. Hahnemann wrote, "man seems manifestly created for enjoyment, (but) in his choice of enjoyments and in the quantity of them, he alone transgresses the bounds of moderation; he alone of all living beings."

He elaborates, "when we pass the boundary line beyond this moderation, as is so frequently the case among the higher and middle ranks of society, luxury, gluttony and depraved sensuality commence. Persons in easy circumstances are apt to imagine that the excessively multiplied indulgence in excitement of the senses of all kinds is to live, in the true sense of the word. 'I have lived much,' says the enervated voluptuary; to me it seems that he has lived little."

Hahnemann explains that the human nervous system cannot tolerate excessive enjoyments; over-indulgence damages health. "The temperate man easily discovers these limits…and he is happy, happier than the intemperate man can have any idea of … But if I go on undeterred, making it my business to force more indulgencies upon my body than is consistent with its well-being; if I employ ingenious methods by means of stimulants of various kinds, to coax the nerves fatigued by excess, to the reception of new and immoderate enjoyments, I shall doubtless at length be enabled to indulge in debauchery, that is, to burden my nerves with an unnatural number of impression which the temperate man could not bear; but this is only a semblance of greater enjoyment. There is no reality in it."

Hahnemann gives the example, "the ploughman who only drinks his pot of beer in an alehouse on a Sunday after church, has in the few hours he spends over it perhaps twice as much enjoyment for his few half-pence as my Lord Mayor who can boast perhaps of having swallowed during the week a thousand times as much money in luscious Constantia wine. The former quenched his thirst on working days at a spring behind his cottage, and was refreshed whilst the latter was made hot, sleepy and stupid, by the excessive quantity of his costly liquor."

Regarding the libertine, Hahnemann states, "in vain does (he) imagine that the disgusting dissipation of his faculties that were created for higher objects can procure him great pleasure and real enjoyments ... Poor fellow! He knows not the ecstatic feeling of a rare, an ardent embrace of the faithful wife, whose virtue and modesty inspire the deepest respect, and can conjure love of the real sort into her enraptured husband."

And, "…the gourmand must seek to keep the nerves of his tongue up to the mark to enable them to allow still more food to pass down his throat…and he must stir up his respected chef de cuisine to invent something new to tickle the languid palate of his poor master, and so to over-stimulate the cardiac orifice of his stomach that it shall forget its office to reject what is superfluous."

Summing up this chapter, Hahnemann writes, "Why do (the wealthy classes) in the gratification of their animal requirements sink so far beneath the poorest classes of the people, and I might say still lower? Apparently for this simple reason, that they are bent on having much enjoyment here below, and this they might have, if they knew the proper, the true, the sole means of attaining it…moderation!"

It's popular to give up certain foods or drinks entirely—for New Year's, for Lent, or to follow the latest "research" dietary fad. And often things like TV, gaming, social media, and mindless shopping are eliminated for periods of time … but Hahnemann would tell you that it's okay to indulge a little, and that limiting the treat will make it that much sweeter!