Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. The Gut Feelings of Medical Culture

   • Manon Mathias, Alison M. Moore

   Pages 1-14

3. The Great American Evil—Indigestion: Digestive Health and Democratic Politics in Walt Whitman

   • Tripp Rebrovick

   Pages 15-35

4. The “Second Brain”: Dietetics and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century France

   • Bertrand Marquer

   Pages 37-54

5. Situating the Anal Freud in Nineteenth-Century Imaginaries of Excrement and Colonial Primitivity

   • Alison M. Moore

   Pages 55-83

6. Food for Thought: Consuming and Digesting as Political Metaphor in French Satirical Prints

   • Dorothy Johnson

   Pages 85-108

7. Being “Hangry”: Gastrointestinal Health and Emotional Well-Being in the Long Nineteenth Century

   • Emilie Taylor-Brown

   Pages 109-132

8. Visceralism and the Superior Mind in French Medicine and Literature, 1750–1850

   • Anne Vila

   Pages 133-154

9. Digestion and Brain Work in Zola and Huysmans

   • Manon Mathias

   Pages 155-176

10. Textual (In)Digestions in Flaubert, Zola and Huysmans: Accumulation, Extraction, Regulation

    • Larry Duffy

    Pages 177-204

11. Hygiene, Food and Digestion in Post-Unified Italy: Paolo Mantegazza’s Medicine in the Kitchen and Beyond (1861–1900)

    • Cristiano Turbil

    Pages 205-224

12. The State and the Stomach: Feeding the Social Organism in 1830s New England

    • Molly S. Laas

    Pages 225-242

13. Food Faiths: Gut Science and Spiritual Eating

    • Catherine L. Newell

    Pages 243-259

14. Back Matter

    Pages 261-276

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This book considers the historical and cultural origins of the gut-brain relationship now evidenced in numerous scientific research fields. Bringing together eleven scholars with wide interdisciplinary expertise, the volume examines literal and metaphorical digestion in different spheres of nineteenth-century life. Digestive health is examined in three sections in relation to science, politics and literature during the period, focusing on Northern America, Europe and Australia. Using diverse methodologies, the essays demonstrate that the long nineteenth century was an important moment in the Western understanding and perception of the gastroenterological system and its relation to the mind in the sense of cognition, mental wellbeing, and the emotions. This collection explores how medical breakthroughs are often historically preceded by intuitive models imagined throughout a range of cultural productions. 

• digestive health
• gut health
• nineteenth-century literature
• Victorian literature and culture
• history of science and medicine
• emotion in gut health
• indigestion and literature
• health and wellness nineteenth century

“This collection is an excellent example of interdisciplinary medical humanities scholarship: its essays are erudite and informative: they engage critically with a range of literary, medical and scientific texts and put them into productive and thought-provoking dialogue. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the ideological, political and metaphorical significance of digestive health in nineteenth-century culture.” (Professor Hannah Thompson, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)

• University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

  Manon Mathias

• Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia

  Alison M. Moore

Manon Mathias is Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, UK, and author of Vision in the Novels of George Sand (2016). 

Alison M. Moore is Senior Lecturer in modern European history and Convenor of History research at Western Sydney University, Australia. She is author with Peter Cryle of Frigidity, an Intellectual History (Palgrave, 2011), and author of Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, masochism and historical teleology (2015).

 

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