Thinking about the Gym: Greek Ideals, Newtonian Bodies and Exercise in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain

Revival of Greek ideas about exercise in the British and Irish Enlightenment by doctors led to a shift in understandings about the independent mind by establishing a relation between bodily and mental health. By the late 1730s, interest shifted away from mind and body and towards the sentiments and passions, which marked gender distinctions and held together national communities. Gilbert West's writing about the Olympics in the 1740s indicated the difficulty in resolving tensions about exercise and sport producing aristocratic distinction and violent passions as against their encouragement of healthy minds and civic virtue in the nation.