Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: The relationship between health and exercise involves risks as well as rewards. This article focuses on heart disease and the marathon to show how doctors have negotiated that relationship over a century. Three distinct changes in biomedical attitudes towards vigorous exercise are outlined. First, the mid-Victorian interpretation of pathological hypertrophy of the heart was overturned at the end of the nineteenth century. Secondly, hypertrophy was reinvented as a beneficial physiological adaptation in the 1940s and 1950s. Thirdly, these claims of distinctiveness were challenged by the leisure revolution. Sports doctors and cardiologists reinvented exercise as a drug that could only be safely used with the guidance of a medical professional. Medicalising sport reduced its risk and maximised its reward, both to the individual and the state.
Source: Social History of Medicine
DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkp063
Author: V. Heggie
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,864
Funder: Medical Research Council
OpenAlex ID: W2098996367