Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture ed. by Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture ed. by Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore Ian Miller (bio) Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore, eds. Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2018. xi + 276 pp. Hardcover, $159.99. These are exciting times for humanities scholars interested in the abdomen. Perhaps some scholars would consider the gut to be a curious, even niche, object of historical inquiry. I would disagree. Eating. Digesting. Defecating. All these bodily processes are intimately tied to our physical and emotional well-being. Understanding them can take us to the core of human experience, emotions, and existence—physical and mental. And taking the gut as a starting point can raise unexpected, but important, questions. Why, since the nineteenth century, has digestive health been discussed in relation to broader ideas of nationhood and national identity? For what reasons have ideas about gut health intersected with broader issues such as class, gender, and race? How did the rise of capitalist modernity change (western) humans' experiences of their gut? In recent decades, scientists have identified the gut as a bodily region swarming with communities of bacteria. Each of us has a unique microbiome that forms early in life. Enter the new medical sub-discipline of nutritional psychiatry, which seeks to comprehend how our gut health affects our moods, positively or negatively. These psychiatrists believe that a fuller grasp of the gut-brain axis will shed light on how our eating affects our feelings and elucidate links between gut health and disorders including depression and anxiety. A growing number of scholars beyond the sciences are illuminating the gut's modern history, including Elizabeth Williams, who has succinctly examined the history and science of appetite;1 James Whorton, who emphasizes the importance attached to the bowels in early twentieth-century America;2 and Christopher Forth and Ana Carden-Coyne, who have explored topics such as the history of fat.3 My own research approaches the stomach from a historical perspective, revealing its fundamental importance to past experiences of health and well-being.4 In recent years, emerging scholars such as Evelien Lemmens and Elsa Richardson have also taken a historical approach to the gut. Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore's essay collection, Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture, is situated in this growing body of engaging interdisciplinary research, linking the science of gut health to the aforementioned issues of identity, nationhood, modernity, class, gender, and race. [End Page 187] The phrase "gut feeling" perfectly encapsulates the volume's thematic approach. Using diverse methodologies rooted primarily in literature and medical history, Gut Feeling and Digestive Health establishes decisively that the nineteenth century was a time of heightened concern about gut health and its implications for emotional well-being. As the editors explain, this was a period when a critical mass of doctors, psychiatrists, novelists, artists, ethnographers, politicians, and religious leaders all wrote extensively on the relation between digestive function (or, more often than not, "dysfunction") and the human emotions (1–2). This insight justifies an interdisciplinary approach that, despite its diversity, underpins a remarkably cohesive volume—the result of careful editing and an artful weaving together of key topics and themes. Many of this volume's contributors examine dietary science's burgeoning influence on literary works. In his opening chapter, Tripp Rebrovick investigates the impact of esteemed nutritional chemist Justus von Liebig on Walt Whitman's mid-century writings. Like many physicians and scientists, Whitman was enthralled by the workings of the digestive system and shared with them the view that indigestion was a "great American evil" that threatened the body politic (15). This coupling of digestive health with national identity provides a thread that runs throughout Gut Feeling and Digestion. In France, as with Britain and other countries, the abdomen became known as the "second brain"; its disorders constituted a national threat. These interwoven concerns also featured in the writing of Émile Zola, as explored in chapters by Bertrand Marquer, Anne Vila, and Manon Mathias. Joris-Karl Huysmans's handling of digestion is discussed in contributions by Mathias and...