Can these 1,800-year-old-wellness tips help you live better?

It can be tempting, amid the chaos of modern life, to look backwards – to yearn for simpler times when smartphones didn’t exist and no one had ever uttered the word “microplastics”. Some turn to Freud, others to the stoics. For one week, I turned to one of the most famous physicians of the ancient world: Galen.

A second-century Greco-Roman physician and philosopher, Galen served as court physician to Marcus Aurelius’s son Commodus. He was also a prolific writer (his texts account for an estimated 10% of all existing Greek literature from before AD350) whose theories shaped western medicine for more than 1,000 years. Now, some of his most significant texts have been collected in the new book How to Be Healthy: An Ancient Guide to Wellness.

His texts explore the mind-body connection, exercise, diet and the definitions of health and disease. While some of his advice is suspect (he suggests that going to the gym makes one “idle, drowsy and slow in judgment”) and some simply impractical (in one exercise he recommends holding back four horses at the same time) there are nuggets of timeless wisdom. In one chapter, for example, he advises that in order to avoid distress, one must practice gratitude for what one has and avoid comparing oneself to others.

If he was skilled enough to keep emperors and gladiators healthy, surely Galen can help me, a thirtysomething journalist who spends most of her day hunched over a laptop.

I come up with a four-point plan of action based on his recommendations. First, in order to identify my own unique shortcomings, Galen suggests I ask older men what they think is wrong with me. Then, for fitness, I have to do something Galen calls “practice exercise with the small ball”. Finally, I must determine my balance of the four humors – four bodily fluids that Galen saw as key to one’s health – and eat according to my “humoral balance”.

But I’m no expert. To make sure I’ve interpreted Galen’s advice correctly, I reach out to Dr Katherine D Van Schaik, an assistant professor of classical and Mediterranean studies at Vanderbilt University medical center, and a practicing physician, who translated Galen’s writing for the book.

“I think your approach is good,” she says. “It incorporates the tripartite approach that he describes, which is addressing the soul, and also diet and exercise,” she says. But she issues a warning. “This is not formal medical advice,” Van Schaik says. Also, she adds, my plan is “very literal” – I could ask some women what they think is wrong with me as well.

Indeed, Schaik’s preface cautions that because much of Galen’s thinking is based on beliefs about human physiology now known to be false (the four humors, for example), “the med