The principles of good health

By adapting my diet to my constitution, I have always enjoyed good health, and having once learned that what impairs it is always excess, either in eating or in abstaining, I have never had any physician but myself. But I have found that abstinence is the more dangerous by far. Too much brings on indigestion, too little kills.

Giacomo Casanova - History of my life

Doctor's orders! (part deux)

Doctors recommend us to live and behave as animals do - and ordinary people have ever said:

Tenez chauts les pieds et la teste;
Au demeurant, vivez en beste.

[ Keep feet and head warm:
Then live like the beasts.]

Michel de Montaigne - An apology for Raymond Sebond (Complete Essays II,12)

Drunkenness - recommended by doctors once a month

I have heard one of the best doctors in Paris, Silvius, state that it is a good thing once a month to arouse our stomachs by this excess so as to stop their powers from getting sluggish and to stimulate them in order to prevent their growing dull.

Michel de Montaigne - On drunkenness (The complete essays)

Why the ancient Egyptians were the healthiest people in the world

I will describe some of their habits: every month for three successive days they purge themselves, for their health's sake, with emetics and clysters, in the belief that all diseases come from the food a man eats; and it is a fact - even apart from this precaution - that next to the Libyans they are the healthiest people in the world.

Herodotus - Histories (II, 77)