The Olympic Games and the limits of human endeavour
Authors: Christopher Gardner-Thorpe
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2012)

Medicine is concerned with the promotion of health through good public health measures and positive personal endeavour. This holistic approach includes the promotion of fitness, a measure difficult to define but possible to achieve using a well-functioning body and mind. Exercise is fun though more taxing when pushing the boundaries of what is humanly possible.

Sport helps channel energy away from violence that may otherwise be used to cause harm. It helps promote happiness and contentment within communities. Team activities encourage interaction in other areas of life and help players come to terms with failure. Good health has economic advantages for the whole community too, not least in lessening the effects of the current epidemic of obesity.

The boundaries of human endeavour were tested in the games held in 776BC and every four years thereafter in the Sanctuary of the Father of the Gods, Zeus, and in the temples and stadium at Olympia in Greece. Dorians, Ionians, Spartans and Athenians competed (before the Peloponnesian Wars of 460–445BC and 431–404BC); lifelong honour was bestowed upon winners whose images were exhibited in the form of statues, some surviving to this day. Discus, javelin, chariot and hand-to-hand fighting showed who was fittest.

Today, human endeavour is tested in much the same way as at the Olympic Games but ability is demonstrated not only in this formal, public manner. Many people have pushed the boundaries of work and sport, showing bravery and persistence. A few have travelled to the Moon, rowed the Atlantic and swum long distances. Others have traversed the planet with minimum equipment. Television documentaries portray the fortitude of those who fought in the First World War, for example, for the sake of liberty: ‘The work of these people under the greatest of difficulties is beyond all praise.’1

When we fail the test we should try again. Sometimes we are lucky enough to rub shoulders with those who have pushed the boundaries of human endeavour2 from near and far3 and in exposure to extremes of temperature. Arctic and Antarctic exploration,4 mountaineering and seafaring all tax the human body and its resources. Although increasing numbers are scaling Mount Everest, just possible without oxygen, some climbers still die.

We read of heroism here and might conclude that there is little between these self-imposed challenges and a psychopathic mind. It all depends upon the motive. What, then, of those people who have almost reached the summit and turned back to help other climbers who would have perished without their help? There are several reports of this brave and extreme self-denial.5 These are among the exploits of doctors, nurses and other health professionals, including those participating in the Olympics Games.

Perhaps the starting point of revival of the Olympic Games was when the lawyer Robert Dover organized competitive games in the Cotswold Hills. His Olimpick Games were described in 1636.6 The Wenlock Olympian Games in 1850 at Much Wenlock were the brainchild of general practitioner William Penny Brookes.7,8 The Athens Games of 1896 were the beginning of the revival of the Olympic Games in Greece. The Parisian Pierre de Coubertin, whose ‘pedagogie sportive’, moral and social education based on games at school, led him to develop the International Olympic Movement.9 Sir Ludwig Guttmann started the Stoke Mandeville Games for those who were undergoing rehabilitative medicine at the centre he founded, and it was probably from these that the Paralympic Games emerged.10

The August and November issues of the Journal of Medical Biography, also published by the Royal Society of Medicine Press, will tell us in more detail of the extraordinarily taxing and brave exploits of those who have pushed, and still do push further the limits of human endeavour. More than three hundred place names in Antarctica commemorate the contribution of doctors in different ways to the exploration of this huge landmass.11 This is just the tip of the iceberg of human endeavour.