Teddy Roosevelt : 4F &1A, fit and unfit, defective, degenerate --- and heroic

When Theodore Roosevelt was a young adult, he was told by his doctors that because of his many serious chronic diseases, he should take up a soft indoor occupation if he wished a normal lifespan.

Instead, Teddy self-consciously took up his famous 'vigorous life'.

(However, partly due to his excessive vigour, he in the end only lived to age sixty, which he might also have reached if he had taken up the soft life !)

He lived in an age when most scientists considered that humans had a very, very, limited ability to alter the health their genome gave them at birth ------ except to drive it downhill and then inevitably pass that bad health on to their descendants.