I read this little discourse while lounging on Jacksonville Beach this weekend.  It just proves that the value of knowledge without practice is somewhat limited.  This was written by Benjamin Franklin while he was bedridden with gout when he was in his early 70s in October 1780.  This is called “A Dialogue between THE GOUT and Mr. Franklin”.  If you choose to read this, be patient, Franklin was not known for brevity.

 

MR. F.:  Eh! Oh! Eh!  What have I done to merit these cruel sufferings?

 

THE GOUT:  Many things; you have ate and drank too freely, and too much indulged those legs of your in their indolence.

 

MR. F.:  Who is it that accuses me?

 

THE GOUT:  It is I, even I, the Gout.

 

MR. F.:  What! My enemy in person?

 

THE GOUT:  No, not your enemy.

 

MR. F.:  I repeat it, my enemy; for you would not only torment my body to death, but ruin my good name, you reproach me as a glutton and a tippler; now all the world, that knows me, will allow that I am neither the one nor the other.

 

THE GOUT:  The world may think as it pleases; it is always very complaisant to itself, and sometimes to its friends; but I very well know that the quantity of meat and drink proper for a man who takes a reasonable degree of exercise, would be too much for another who never takes any…

 

  If your situation in life is a sedentary one, your amusements, your recreation, at least should be active.  You ought to walk or ride; or, if the weather prevents that, play at billiards.  But let us examine your course of life.  While the mornings are long, and you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do?  Why, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with books, pamphlets, or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the reading.  Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast, four dishes of tea with cream, and one or two buttered toasts, with slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most easily digested.

 

  Immediately afterwards you sit down to write at your desk, or converse with persons who apply to you on business.  Thus the time passes till one, without any kind of bodily exercise.  But all this I could pardon, in regard, as you say to your sedentary condition.  But what is your practice after dinner?  Walking in the beautiful gardens of those friends with whom you have dined would be the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixed down to chess, where you are found engaged for two or three hours.           

 

  You know Mademoiselle Brillon’s gardens, and what fine walks they contain; you know the handsome flight of an hundred steps which lead from the terrace to the lawn below.  You have been in the practice of visiting this amiable family twice a week, after dinner, and it is a maxim of your own, that “a man may take as much exercise in walking a mile up and down stairs, as in ten on level ground.”  What an opportunity was here for you to have had exercise in both these ways!  Did you embrace it, and how often?

 

MR. F.:  I cannot immediately answer that question.

 

THE GOUT:  I will do it for you:  not once.