Making the body politic through medicine: taste, health and identity in the Dutch Republic, 1636–1698

Abstract

AbstractHow, where and by whom were bodies shaped, maintained and politicized through medicine, diet and taste in the seventeenth-century Low Countries? The medicinal use of foodstuffs, tastes and diets played an important role in the maintenance and restoration of health in the early modern period. Simultaneously, the metaphor of the body politic has been used widely in historical regimes, yet the focus tends to be on royalty or elite bodies, and on political literature and the medical metaphors used in relation to the body politic in such documents. In the seventeenth-century Low Countries, politically engaged medical men published popular medical literature aimed at the lower and middle classes in which they offered advice on diet and taste, which was aimed not only at maintaining and restoring health, but also at shaping emerging national tastes and identities. This chapter analyses six of the most popular medical and pharma-botanical works in the vernacular by seventeenth-century Dutch physicians. It shows that politics – and, by extension, ideas about the body politic – influenced popular medicine, and thus shaped the health, bodies and identities of the lower and middle classes through diet and taste.