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PALGRAVE
STUDIES IN
LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND
MEDICINE
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Catherine Belling
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new
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in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine.
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and emerging topics as well as established ones.
Editorial board
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies,
Stony Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania
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Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
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Acknowledgements
v
Contents
vii
viii Contents
Index 261
Contributors
ix
List of Figures
xi
CHAPTER 1
There is no doubt that the idea of gut health having systemic effects on
human physiology is an ancient one, as countless health enthusiasts today
pronounce with reference to supposed quotations from Hippocrates.1
But in the nineteenth century, a critical mass of doctors, psychiatrists,
novelists, artists, ethnographers, politicians, and religious leaders all
began to consider that digestive function principally influenced both
emotion and cognition, often dynamically engaging with such ideas
across wide disciplinary divides. Such reflections on the relationship
between the digestive system and the mind spread far beyond medical
journals and clinical practices, representative of the new popular enthusi-
asm for scientific thought in nineteenth-century cultures, which resulted
Uses and Meanings of Hippocrates”; King, “Hippocrates Didn’t Write the Oath, so Why Is
He the Father of Medicine?”.
M. Mathias (*)
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
A. M. Moore
Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia
in a broad range of genres through which evocation of the gut was imag-
inatively expressed.
This book is about that shifting focus on gut health in its relation to
the mind and emotion, as epitomized in the English-language expres-
sion that refers to intuition as “gut feeling”. But it is also a book about
the emergence of this medical concept throughout literary, artistic, reli-
gious, nationalist, and ethnographic forms of representation. Embedded
in this expression is the notion that the gut is the first part of the body
to respond to the environment, producing an emotional sixth sense that
then governs rational thought processes. This concept is not so foreign
to our current physiological models in which the intestinal tract from
mouth to anus is described as an exterior organ that mediates between
the outside world and the internal viscera, with the intestinal epithelium
providing an immunological gateway between self and other.2 But our
current medical models too have recently been undergoing an important
shift toward even greater systemic emphasis on the importance of diges-
tive function and intestinal microbiota.
In fact, we are living in an exciting moment for ideas about the diges-
tive system since there is currently an explosion of scientific research
in relation to the “gut-brain axis”, suggesting that the gut microbi-
ome may have a much larger role in human physiology than was pre-
viously realized, influencing not only gastrointestinal health itself, but
also obesity, metabolic health,3 the immune system,4 cognitive function,
mental illness, and neurodegenerative diseases.5 In alternative health
2 Silverthorn,
Human Physiology: An Integrated Approach, 698.
3 Belei
et al., “The Relationship Between Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver disease and
Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth Among Overweight and Obese Children and
Adolescents”; Vrieze et al., “Transfer of Intestinal Microbiota from Lean Donors
Increases Insulin Sensitivity in Individuals with Metabolic Syndrome”; and Müller et al.,
“Gastrointestinal Transit Time, Glucose Homeostasis and Metabolic Health: Modulation
by Dietary Fibres.”
4 Tripathi et al., “Intermittent Hypoxia and Hypercapnia, a Hallmark of Obstructive
Sleep Apnea, Alters the Gut Microbiome and Metabolome”; Armstrong and Armstrong,
“Interactions of Gut Microbiota, Endotoxemia, Immune Function, and Diet in Exertional
Heatstroke.”
5 Magnusson et al., “Relationship Between Diet-Related Changes in the Gut Microbiome
and Cognitive Flexibility”; Nguyen et al., “Overview and Systematic Review of Studies of
Microbiome in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder”; and Westfalls et al., “Microbiome,
Probiotics and Neurodegenerative Diseases: Deciphering the Gut Brain Axis.”
1 THE GUT FEELINGS OF MEDICAL CULTURE 3
communities over the past ten years, there has been an immense growth
of popular interest in matters relating to the gut, as evidenced by the
emergence of functional medicine in the USA, which has a strong focus
on intestinal balance as the key to health and longevity. The opening
pages of the work Unconventional Medicine, by the American functional
health clinician Chris Kresser (one of the most influential figures of that
movement) begins with the story of a child patient whose profound
behavioral problems were found to correlate with severe intestinal bacte-
rial imbalance, managed finally by a drastic change of diet.6 The success
of the bestselling book Gut, the Inside Story (2014) by the German gas-
troenterology PhD student, Giulia Enders, is a clear indication of how
much questions of intestinal health are now seen as central among read-
ers of books about health.7 Popular interest in questions relating to the
“gut-brain axis” proposed by increasing numbers of scientific researchers
has been stimulated in recent years by the publication of articles on the
web-based Nature.com8 and in The Lancet.9 It has now become common
to hear even popular health enthusiasts cite the fact that there are more
microbial cells in our bodies than the cells of the human body itself.10
The implications of how we understand our “selves” is clearly suggesting
a new vision of the human as multi-genomic, individualized as much by
the composition of our gut micro-organisms as by our personalities, con-
stituted as much by the life-forms living inside us as by our own genetic
inheritance. There has also been a growth of interest specifically in ideas
about the relationship between gut function and mental health, as a
result of scientific work that has shown that the vagus nerve mediates
neurotransmitter balance via the enteric nervous system, which was pop-
ularized in a series of recent articles in the web-based Psychology Today.11
9 http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(17)30147-4/
11 https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201708/the-microbi-
Central to this area of scholarship, which has boomed since the turn
of the twenty-first century, is the importance of transnational team
research, as biochemists, neurologists, endocrinologists, immunologists,
gastroenterologists, and microbiologists from different parts of the world
work together on questions such as the potential links between the gut
and depression, cognitive decline, or mental illness. In our book, we
have taken a similar approach toward our humanistic inquiry into nine-
teenth-century ideas about “gut feeling”. Bringing together eleven
scholars with wide interdisciplinary expertise, this volume examines lit-
eral and metaphorical digestion in a range of spheres in nineteenth-
century life and asks why digestive health mattered for modern culture.
Focusing on Northern America and Europe from the perspectives of lit-
erary studies; history of science and medicine; art history; politics; eth-
nography; and religious studies, we have targeted three central questions:
Which meanings were given to the digestive system in the writings and
culture of this period? How did these meanings differ between particular
national contexts or transfer across them globally? How do these find-
ings help us better understand the relationship between the body and the
mind?
By looking at digestive health from a historical and cultural perspec-
tive, this volume offers distinctive insights into an emergent area of med-
icine that now so emphatically integrates the body, the mind, and the
emotions. However novel the new gut-brain axis science may seem, in
fact many individuals who engaged with medical thought in the nine-
teenth century drew intuitive conclusions of a similar nature. And just as
today we see the gut taking center stage in popular health movements,
so too in the nineteenth century it was an area of medicine particularly
amenable to vulgarization. Of course, nineteenth-century explanations
of the role of digestion in cognition, emotion, personality, and general
health were speculative and often widely imaginative in contrast to the
well-formulated mechanistic models suggested by scientists today.
But we should not fall prey to the easy tendency to mock the past as
a means of elevating our present achievements. Without the creative cul-
tural imagination of “gut feeling” elaborated in the culture of the long
nineteenth century, it seems unlikely that medical researchers would ever
have thought to look for ways in which digestion regulates other physi-
ological functions, including those within the brain, or notice evidence
of it doing so. Scientists do not operate in a vacuum but are embedded
in cultural traditions and discourses, using both their left and right brain
1 THE GUT FEELINGS OF MEDICAL CULTURE 5
explore the relations between text and body in particular authors, see, for example,
Goellner and Murphy, eds., Bodies of the Text; Harrow, Zola, The Body Modern; and
Georgopoulou, The Body as Text in Shakespeare’s Plays.
15 Miller, A Modern History of the Stomach; Whorton, Inner Hygiene; and Salisbury and
from the Renaissance to the Present; Bladerston and Guy, eds., Sex and Sexuality in Latin
America; Moore, ed., Sexing Political Culture in the History of France; and Rütten and
King, eds., Contagionism and Contagious Diseases.
6 M. MATHIAS AND A. M. MOORE
the mid-lower body and its functions, but with a rigorous focus on the
digestive system, rather than the important but much-studied questions
of obesity or anorexia. In so doing, it advances the humanistic study of
digestive health, an area of research which is today attracting major sci-
entific attention, yet whose historical and cultural significance remains
relatively unexplored.
By concentrating on this part of the body, our study challenges the
existing literature on food in the nineteenth century, which has mostly
examined gastronomy or social attitudes to eating rather than gastric
health, regarded as puerile, unsavory, or simply irrelevant because it is
assumed (incorrectly) to vary little across time and place. By opening up
a cultural exploration of gastrointestinal health, the volume reveals its
essential importance not only in current medicine and science but also
in past politics, literature, art, ethnography, psychiatry, emotional health,
intellectual processes, morality, and spirituality. As this list shows, the
range of sources considered in the volume is broad, requiring an equally
broad multi-disciplinary expertise, comprising literary studies, history of
emotions, history of science and medicine, religious studies, politics, art
history, and the history of anthropology and ethnography. Combined
with this rich range of methodologies is a focus on changing views of
the digestive system in nineteenth-century culture, as all chapters address
the significance of gastric well-being in the period and its implications for
our understanding of mind and body.
This is the first book then to consider digestive health in the nine-
teenth century from these mulitple combined angles. Each chapter
focuses on a particular cultural context, time period, individual, text,
visual material, or social theory, but all chapters address the meanings and
significance of digestive health in modern culture. Given the centrality of
the stomach in France in this period, especially in the fields of preven-
tive medicine, alienist thought, gastronomy, and the novel—four fields in
which the country was a leading force at this point—several essays take
a French focus. These concerns, however, are part of a broader inter-
national discussion surrounding the place of the digesting body within
modern society, and the volume examines the different permutations of
this theme in other emerging industrial nations, in particular Northern
America, Germanic Europe, Italy, colonial Australia, and Britain.
It was during the nineteenth century that the growth of sedentary
forms of middle-class labor in these countries prompted new med-
ical concerns about digestion and constipation, and research into
1 THE GUT FEELINGS OF MEDICAL CULTURE 7
sections and within individual essays. For example, the political dimen-
sion is examined not only in Section One but also in many essays in
Section Three, and in several essays, the scientific and the literary are nat-
urally intertwined.
The volume has a broad geographic scope, with chapters focused on
French culture (Marquer, Johnston, Vila, Mathias, and Duffy), several
on the USA (Rebrovick, Laas, Newell), one on England (Taylor-Brown),
one on Italy (Turbil), and one spanning Germanic, American, British,
French, and Australian sources (Moore). The slight concentration of
focus on French culture is a product of the topic in question: France
was a striking example of fascination with questions of the gut during
the nineteenth century, in part due to its strong materialist intellectual
heritage, the importance of realist currents in its literary traditions, and
the crises of its urban development and disease epidemics producing a
sudden growth in medical knowledge of bacteria and intestinal illnesses.
These crises were important drivers of the microbial discoveries of Louis
Pasteur and the international medical shift toward a “germ theory” of
disease in 1850–1870. The sudden changes in lifeways of the rapidly
growing sedentary middle classes in this period also meant that those
cultures with the most urban development faced new problems of intes-
tinal health on a mass scale, hence the preponderance of representations
from France, England, and the USA.
This collection of essays does not offer a history of only one part of
the digestive system: Such studies already exist such as Ian Miller’s A
Modern History of the Stomach (2011), and James Whorton’s Inner
Hygiene (2000) with its focus on constipation; nor does it focus uniquely
on the emergence of medical specialists of the gut such as W.F. Bynum’s
edited collection, Gastroenterology in Britain (1997).17 Neither is this
a book on food studies in the sense of cuisine, gastronomy, eating cus-
toms, eating disorders, or weight management. The focus is specifically
on the digestive system: the volume concentrates on modern Western
culture as an intellectual space in which a distinct set of practices and
attitudes toward the gut began to solidify in the nineteenth century,
particularly the tensions between the physical and the moral, emo-
tional, or psychological. The book does not intend to offer a survey of
17 Miller, A Modern History of the Stomach; Whorton, Inner Hygiene; and Bynum, ed.,
Gastroenterology in Britain.
1 THE GUT FEELINGS OF MEDICAL CULTURE 11
Bibliography
Armstrong, L. E., E. C. Lee, and E. M. Armstrong. “Interactions of Gut
Microbiota, Endotoxemia, Immune Function, and Diet in Exertional
Heatstroke.” Journal of Sports Medicine (April 2018). https://doi.org/
10.1155/2018/5724575.
Belei, O., L. Olariu, A. Dobresku, T. Marcovici, and O. Marginean. “The
Relationship Between Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease and Small Intestinal
Bacterial Overgrowth Among Overweight and Obese Children and
Adolescents.” Journal of Pediatric and Endocrinology and Metabolism 30, no. 11
(October 2017): 1161–1168. https://doi.org/10.1515/jpem-2017-0252.
Bladerston, Daniel, and Donna J. Guy, eds. Sex and Sexuality in Latin America.
New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Bynum, William F., ed. Gastroenterology in Britain. London: Wellcome Institute
for the History of Medicine, 1997.
12 M. MATHIAS AND A. M. MOORE
Website Articles
https://www.nature.com/collections/dyhbndhpzv. Accessed 12 October 2017.
h t t p : / / w w w. t h e l a n c e t . c o m / j o u r n a l s / l a n g a s / a r t i c l e / P I I S 2 4 6 8 -
1253(17)30147-4/fulltext. Accessed 12 October 2017.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201708/the-micro-
biome-gut-brain-axis-relies-your-vagus-nerve. Accessed 12 October 2017.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-waves/201606/what-we-have-
second-brain-the-microbiota-gut-brain-axis. Accessed 12 October 2017.
h t t p : / / w w w. t h e l a n c e t . c o m / j o u r n a l s / l a n g a s / a r t i c l e / P I I S 2 4 6 8 -
1253(17)30147-4/fulltext. Accessed 12 October 2017.
CHAPTER 2
Tripp Rebrovick
T. Rebrovick (*)
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Dietetic Discourses.”
2 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge; and, the Discourse on Language.
Liebig and Graham
Before the emergence of nutrition science in the nineteenth century,
the dominant dietetic discourse in European medicine was the system
of humoral medicine.4 According to the tenets of humoral medicine, all
entities in the cosmos—food and the human body included—were com-
posed of four specific properties or qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry).
Humoralism thereby understood digestion as the assimilation of the
qualities of the food by the eater.5 With the rise of nutritionism, how-
ever, food and the human body came to be understood as sets of com-
ponents or nutrients, i.e., collections of chemicals rather than collections
of qualities.6 Chemical constituents (eventually encompassing carbohy-
drates, proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals) replaced the four humors
(blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) as the building blocks of
both food and the body. Human bodies ceased to be balanced organic
systems assimilating the qualities of their foods and became instead
motors or machines requiring food as fuel.
A central figure in effecting this transition was the German chem-
ist Justus von Liebig. In particular, Liebig revolutionized the fields of
plant and animal nutrition, first, by arguing that plants required miner-
als and not just organic matter to grow, and, second, by describing ideal
human diets in terms of their nutritional or chemical components rather
than in terms of their agreement with the temperament or constitution
of the eater. In his text Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and
Physiology (1842), Liebig argued that plants required minerals, especially
nitrogen, in order to grow.7 In the Familiar Letters on Chemistry (1843),
Liebig’s more widely circulated and popular text, he explained his new
8 Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry and Its Relation to Commerce, Physiology, and
Agriculture.
9 Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (Der Streit Der Fakultäten), 199.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 70.
2 THE GREAT AMERICAN EVIL—INDIGESTION … 19
13 Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry and Its Relation to Commerce, Physiology, and
Agriculture, 74.
14 Rebrovick, “The Politics of Diet: ‘Eco-Dietetics,’ Neoliberalism, and the History of
Dietetic Discourses”; Scrinis, Nutritionism; and Shapin, “‘You Are What You Eat.’”
15 Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie”; Levine, School Lunch Politics.
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