Appetite and Its Discontents

Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950

Appetite and Its Discontents (High Resolution)

Paper $35.00 ISBN: 9780226693040 Published March 2020

Cloth $105.00 ISBN: 9780226692999 Published November 2020

E-book $10.00 to $34.99 About E-books ISBN: 9780226693187 Published April 2020

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents, Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science.

Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself..

Table of Contents

Contents
Review Quotes

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Part One Anxieties of Appetite: Created Needs in the Enlightenment, 1750–1800
Introduction to Part One

1 Why We Eat: The Ancient Legacy
2 “False or Defective” Appetite in the Medical Enlightenment
3 Human and Animal Appetite in Natural History and Physiology

Part Two The Elusiveness of Appetite: Laboratory and Clinic, 1800–1850
Introduction to Part Two

4 Perils and Pleasures of Appetite at 1800: Xavier Bichat and Erasmus Darwin
5 The Physiology of Appetite to 1850
6 Extremes and Perplexities of Appetite in Clinical Medicine

Part Three Intelligent or “Blind and Unconscious”? Appetite, 1850–1900
Introduction to Part Three

7 The Drive to Eat in Nutritional Physiology
8 The Psychology of Ingestion: Appetite in Physiological and Animal Psychology
9 Peripheral or Central? Disordered Eating in Clinical Medicine

Part Four Appetite as a Scientific Object, 1900–1950
Introduction to Part Four

10 Psyche, Nerves, and Hormones in the Physiology of Ingestion
11 Appetite and the Nature-Nurture Divide: Eating Behavior in Psychology and Ethology
12 Somatic, Psychic, Psychosomatic: The Medicine of Troubled Appetite

Epilogue: Appetite after 1950

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Review Quotes

Social History of Medicine

"Deeply researched. . . . [Williams] has written what is undoubtedly the most comprehensive account of scientific and medical thinking since the Enlightenment about appetite. Her book is clearly and elegantly written, prodigiously researched and copiously referenced. It should be essential reading for historians of science, medicine and food."

CHOICE

"This fascinating book, magisterial and yet accessible, opens up broad questions about human life and culture through a careful focus on the meaning of appetite as a central, albeit often ill examined, 'natural' human drive. . . . Chapter by elegant chapter, the author elucidates contextual changes and deftly illustrates significant arguments through focused analyses covering Hippocrates and Aristotle through 20th-century psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The limitations set by the author for cogent analysis scarcely limit the connections that will reward readers, from central themes of gender and identities to relationships of appetite and larger systems of production and consumption, especially as she poses questions linking these historical processes to contemporary issues that permeate science, medicine, and Western culture more generally. . . . Rewarding and stimulating. . . . Recommended."

The Biologist (UK)

"The narrative covers not only a broad swathe of time, but a huge range of disciplines impinging on the activity of eating. . . . The text is copiously referenced and well written in a solidly factual style. It will appeal to those interested in how something we all intuitively think we understand is actually very hard to pin down."

Robert A. Nye, Oregon State University

"Williams has written a fascinating and comprehensive history of the efforts of Western science and medicine to elucidate the functions and dysfunctions of appetite from the eighteenth century to the present. Her analysis of the myriad disciplinary and clinical studies on this elusive entity yields new and important insights into the evolution of methods and experiments on hunger and eating in medical and scientific practice against the background of the dramatic changes in the food supply over time. This deeply learned history has lessons galore for all us contemporary eaters."

Dana Simmons, University of California, Riverside

"There is no equivalent scientific history of appetite available today. This book is the product of immense and extraordinarily wide-ranging research and it provides an important public service: it shows the narrow historical limits of current frames for thinking about appetite and obesity, and vividly brings alive other ways of thinking which once held sway. I strongly recommend it."

CHoW Line

"What kind of phenomenon is appetite? Is it a natural thing or something driven by the availability of culinary luxury? Can be appetite be trusted as a guide to good eating or something that should be moralized or managed? . . . [Williams] records thinking that saw (and still see) appetite as a division or union between mind and body, questions what is normal and what is pathological, and asks is appetite a personal responsibility or something we can turn over (or blame) on dietetic authorities. Eventually and inevitably, she comes to examine attitudes toward obesity, with wide ranging theories including glandular, pathological fat tissue, maladies of nutrition, heredity, or habit."

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