Quick answer: The Tacuinum Sanitatis was a medieval handbook of health, adapted from Ibn Butlan's eleventh-century Taqwim al-sihha. It organized wellbeing around the six non-naturals, air, food and drink, motion and rest, sleep, evacuation and the emotions, each tuned to your humoral temperament.
Before there were diet books there was the regimen, the ordering of daily life to keep the body in balance. Its most beautiful expression is the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a health manual so richly illustrated that its garden and kitchen scenes are now famous in their own right. Beneath the pictures lies a whole theory of how to live well by temperament.
A Handbook of Health from Baghdad to Lombardy
The book descends from the Taqwim al-sihha, the "Almanac of Health," written by the Christian physician Ibn Butlan in Baghdad in the eleventh century. He arranged the whole of practical medicine as a table, each item with its nature, its degree and its remedy for harm. Translated into Latin as the Tacuinum Sanitatis, it was copied and lavishly painted in northern Italy around 1390, where each entry, a fruit, a wind, a season, an activity, received a full-page miniature. It stands in the same tradition of learned medicine that Europe inherited from Avicenna.
The Six Non-Naturals
The frame of the regimen was Galen's res non naturales, the six "non-naturals," the things that are neither part of the body nor disease but shape health by how they are managed. Keep them in order and the temperament stays balanced; let them run to excess and it tips.
| The six non-naturals | What it covered | | --- | --- | | Air and environment | Climate, winds, the quality of the place you live | | Food and drink | Diet, each item hot or cold, moist or dry, by degree | | Motion and rest | Exercise and its opposite | | Sleep and waking | The length and timing of rest | | Repletion and evacuation | What the body takes in and lets go | | The passions of the soul | Joy, anger, fear, grief and their bodily effects |
Reading by Temperament and Element
Every entry in the Tacuinum was rated by the four qualities and a degree of intensity, so lettuce was cold and moist, pepper hot and dry, and each carried a note on whom it suited and how to correct its harm. The point was always personalization. A hot, dry choleric constitution and a cold, moist phlegmatic one needed opposite regimens, cooling foods for one, warming for the other, in the same logic that underlies astrological nutrition by temperament. Balance was restored by contraries, feeding what was lacking and easing what was in excess.
Where the Stars Came In
The regimen was astrological in its bones. The four qualities are the same four that sort the signs into the four elements, and the seasons, each with its element, called for their own diet and activity. Physicians timed the gathering of herbs and the taking of remedies by the Moon and the planetary hour, and the "children of the planets" tradition assigned temperaments, foods and pursuits to each planet. To live by the Tacuinum was to keep the small world of the body in tune with the great world of the heavens.
Living by the Regimen Today
Read as description rather than prescription, the six non-naturals still map neatly onto the plain levers of wellbeing: air and surroundings, what you eat and drink, how you move and rest, how you sleep, and the weather of your emotions. The old contribution was to insist that the right setting of these dials differs from person to person, according to constitution, which is exactly the personal reading a classical health chart tries to recover.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Tacuinum Sanitatis?
It is a medieval illustrated handbook of health, adapted from Ibn Butlan's eleventh-century Arabic Taqwim al-sihha. It presents the elements of a healthy life, foods, activities, weather and moods, each with its humoral quality, and became famous for the lavish garden and kitchen miniatures in its northern Italian copies.
What are the six non-naturals?
They are Galen's six controllable influences on health: air and environment, food and drink, motion and rest, sleep and waking, repletion and evacuation, and the passions of the soul. Managing them well was thought to keep the humors in balance according to each person's temperament.
Is the regimen of health medical advice?
It was a framework of classical medicine, built on humoral theory rather than the modern clinical science of diet and the body. Physicians of the day read it as practical guidance; today it stands as history and a symbolic model of temperament.
Explore the Regimen
To find the elemental balance and temperament the regimen would tune, cast a free birth chart or read your constitution through a health report, which works from classical temperament rather than fortune-telling. For more traditional technique explained plainly, browse the blog.
