Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950 by Elizabeth A. Williams

Abstract

Reviewed by: Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950 by Elizabeth A. Williams Travis A. Weisse (bio) Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950 elizabeth a. williams University of Chicago Press, 2020 434 pp. The appetite for food is such a ubiquitous, innate, and mundane feature of daily life for all creatures that one could be forgiven for expecting that scientific investigations would have mapped out its peculiarities long ago. But historian of science Elizabeth Williams shows us, through this exhaustive intellectual history of attempts to define, delimit, or investigate appetite, that many of the most elite Western thinkers across time found the concept of appetite too nebulous to answer even the most basic questions [End Page 276] about our core gastrological urge. This book condenses countless clinical observations and laboratory experiments—many only obliquely related—into a relatively simple narrative to make appetite "appear" as a historical object. Following her actors, Williams splits appetite into dozens of incommensurable conceptual slivers, and grappling with them collectively shows us, to a certain extent, why we seem to know so little about something so essential to our lived experience. Williams's book is subdivided chronologically into four major sections, each with three chapters highlighting a different scientific arc, school of thought, or pivotal debate. Though the book's subtitle suggests the material only covers the period from 1750 to 1950, the first quarter of the book explores Western ideas of appetite that predated 1750, from ancient Greece and Rome, through the scientific revolution, and into the Enlightenment. The second section covers the rising importance of laboratory experimentation and new theories of animal chemistry along with increasingly materialist theories of mind and disturbed appetite. The third section examines the effect of Darwinism and new precision experimentation on the development of "animal psychology" and comparative morphology. Finally, in part 4, the hard question of appetite's ontology is set aside in favor of observable, quantifiable feeding behaviors that could be manipulated by products of the laboratory. In each chapter, Williams diligently recounts the major contours of the relevant ideas of the major thinkers in the history of Western science and medicine: Hippocrates, Galen, Descartes, Bichat, Darwin, Pavlov, Freud. One of the main reasons, according to Williams, that the nature of appetite was particularly challenging even for elite Western scientists to elucidate was its liminal existence between hardcore digestive physiology and ethereal social and psychological theories of mind. Regardless of their home discipline, Williams's scientists (themselves often fighting across unbridgeable philosophical gaps: mechanism and vitalism, experimentalism and bedside therapeutics, somaticism and behaviorism) largely shied away from the word appetite in their investigations, preferring to study nearby concepts described as psychic excitation, instincts, ingestive activity, or gastric neuroses. Because scientists across centuries and different disciplines including "physiology, natural history … psychology and ethology" could not agree on a common physical or mental understanding of the appetitive impulse, many investigators answered proxy questions instead, [End Page 277] nipping away at the edges of the problem by examining neighboring concerns about the intricacies of digestive physiology or by exploring links between hunger and the nervous system, hormones, or patterns in animal behavior (4). When first attempting to locate the appetite in the body, physiologists quickly realized they needed more sophisticated models of the structure and behavior of the many intersecting bodily systems involved in digestion: organs, muscles, nerves, glands. Was the stomach itself really "feeling" hungry? If not, how did the brain know the stomach was empty or full? Albrecht von Haller's idea of a brawny stomach that forcefully ground food to a paste with its undulating musculature yielded a different vision of appetite than did Lazzaro Spallanzani's vision of the stomach as a largely passive sac of powerful acid (62). Similar paradigmatic transformations occurred for other body systems, yet none of these physiological models yielded much insight for clinicians tasked with monitoring patients' fickle appetites at the bedside. Unlike physiologists, physicians had to be perpetually aware that the appetite could be profoundly influenced by a patient's emotional state, the progress of their disease, and many other contingencies that the reigning physiology of...