The Gut Feelings of Medical Culture

Abstract

This is the first book to consider digestive health in the nineteenth century from the combined angles of politics, literature, art, ethnography, psychiatry, emotional health, intellectual processes, morality, and spirituality. The chapters address the meanings and significance of digestive health in modern France, Northern America, Germanic Europe, Italy, colonial Australia and Britain. By revealing the particular nineteenth-century focus on digestive function and its influence on both emotion and cognition, the volume makes a new contribution not only to the history of literature, science and medicine, but also to current debates about the relationship between the gut and the brain. Here we help to show how medical breakthroughs are often historically preceded by intuitive models imagined throughout cultural production of different kinds.