ATHLETICS AND GAMES OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS.
EDWARD M. PLUMMER, M.D.,
AURAL SURGEON TO THE CARNEY HOSPITAL; ASSISTANT AURAL SURGEON TO THE MASSACHUSETTS CHARITABLE EYE AND EAR INFIRMARY; INSTRUCTOR, BOSTON POLYCLINIC; FELLOW OF THE MASSACHUSETTS MEDICAL SOCIETY, Etc.
Reprinted from the American Physical Education Review, 1898.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.,
Lombard & Caustic, Printers, 26a Brattle St.
1898.
Copyrighted
By Edward M. Plummer, M.D.
Boston, 1898.
I. ATHLETIC GAMES AMONG THE HOMERIC HEROES.
BY EDWARD M. PLUMMER, OF BOSTON.
Few kinds of labor develop the body in a symmetrical manner. This is true even in an elementary division of labor. The carpenter and the blacksmith usually have strong, large shoulders and arms, but small and weak legs. The farmer, from excessive bending over his work, loses, in a greater or less degree, his elasticity of body, and often becomes stoop-shouldered. If such defects result from the more primitive forms of labor, it is not at all strange that the laborers of the modern industrial world show bodily peculiarities and variations that correspond, in a marked degree, to their respective trades. A well-known teacher of gymnastics in a New England college has declared himself able to designate the various occupations of laborers in a Boston Labor Day parade, without reference to any sign or banner, merely by inspecting their carriage and physical peculiarities. It may, therefore, be asserted that, while labor involving muscular exertion, if performed in healthful surroundings, supplies the conditions essential to good digestion and assimilation, to a more complete respiration, and to the maintenance of healthy nerves, yet, only rarely, if ever, does it tend to develop the ideal body.
Physical culture differs from labor. Labor, having the design to produce a change in the world of matter outside the body, is not deliberately modified to suit the requirements of perfect physical development. Physical culture, on the other hand, if it really be such, is a system of exercises that, taken together, bring all parts and powers of the body into play, with the sole purpose of producing not only a healthy, but also a symmetrical and graceful body; or, in other words, of developing what the Greeks called εὐρυθμία.