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never been completely dormant, but with the publication of Sherrington's
"Intergrative Action of the Nervous System" in 1906 their investigations
took on a new enthusiasm. Following Professor A.V. Hill's research
on the physiology of athletic performance in the 1920's there has been
a growing flood of investigations into athletic fitness as well as into
the physiological function of man in normal and abnormal conditions.
Teams of investigators at Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games
were unheard of until 1952 and are now commonplace. Since world
war II the writings of scientists in learned and in popular journals have
produced a large body of informed readers who surely contribute to
the present world wide intererest in fitness.
The idea of fitness has long been associated not merely with physical
performance but with the prevention and cure of disease, and
disorder. Because exercise is the main instrument of fitness, to exercise
has been attributed various health giving properties. Most of these
claims made for exercise are without foundation, yet the contrary belief
persits and there will be few teachers of physical education who have
not, at one time or another, been accused of betraying their profession
because they have appeared in school with a streaming nose and a croaking
voice. The latest popular claim for exercise is that it helps to prevent
certain disorders of the cardiovascular system notably coronary
thrombosis.
J. N. Morris in 1949 investigated the sickness records of 31,000
London busmen and found that drivers had a higher rate of coronary
disease than conductors. He adopted the hypothesis that there was
an association between the less active occupation and the disease. He
never claimed that exercise would prevent the disease. Such a casual
link has not yet been established although there is a popular belief that
it has. Morris's later research published in 1956 in which he showed that
the trouser waist measurements of drivers at all stages of their careers
were larger than those of conductors and that they might therefore
have had a predisposition to disease when they took up their sedentary
occupation is not so well known.
Popular beliefs about the prevention of coronary disease, whether
true or false, have undoubtedly increased the general concern for fitness
in those areas of the world where they are held. The vast expenditure
on sport in Western Germany under the Golden Plan initiated in 1960
is ostensibly motivated by a concern for health and prevention of disease.
The Golden Plan estimates an expenditure of £ 569,000,000 in
15 years from 1960. An immediate target of state aid was set at £ 28
m. annually by 1964. By 1961 the annual rate was already £ 13 1 / 2 m.
Here I must mention the modern concern for the fitness of the in-
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