8.1. Lesson 65: Learn a Lesson from The Temperate Life
Edison came of age in an epoch as obsessed with health and diet as our own. It was the heyday of snake oil and patent medicines, of new branches of medicine, and of such philosophers of food and clean living as Post and Kellogg. As for himself, Edison was part of a family that (he said) for three generations had followed the teachings of one Luigi Cornaro in The Temperate Life, a manual for healthy living first published in Italy in 1558 and widely translated and reprinted well into the nineteenth century.
Cornaro prescribed many things, but what most attracted Edison was his injunction to experiment with various foods and dietary routines. "By dint of experimenting," Cornaro wrote, "any ...
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