This book considers the historical and cultural origins of the gut-brain relationship now evidenced in numerous scientific research fields. Bringing together eleven scholars with wide interdisciplinary expertise, the volume examines literal and metaphorical digestion in different spheres of nineteenth-century life. Digestive health is examined in three sections in relation to science, politics and literature during the period, focusing on Northern America, Europe and Australia. Using diverse methodologies, the essays demonstrate that the long nineteenth century was an important moment in the Western understanding and perception of the gastroenterological system and its relation to the mind in the sense of cognition, mental wellbeing, and the emotions. This collection explores how medical breakthroughs are often historically preceded by intuitive models imagined throughout a range of cultural productions.

Autorentext

Manon Mathias is Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, UK, and author of Vision in the Novels of George Sand (2016). 

Alison M. Moore is Senior Lecturer in modern European history and Convenor of History research at Western Sydney University, Australia. She is author with Peter Cryle of Frigidity, an Intellectual History (Palgrave, 2011), and author of Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, masochism and historical teleology (2015).

Inhalt
Chapter 1: The Gut Feelings of Medical Culture, Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore.- Chapter 2: The Great American EvilIndigestion: Digestive Health and Democratic Politics in Walt Whitman, Tripp Rebrovick.- Chapter 3: The "Second Brain": Dietetics and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century France, Bertrand Marquer.- Chapter 4: Situating the Anal Freud in Nineteenth-Century Imaginaries of Excrement and Colonial Primitivity, Alison M. Moore.- Chapter 5: Food for Thought: Consuming and Digesting as Political Metaphor in French Satirical Prints, Dorothy Johnson.- Chapter 6: Being Hangry: Gastrointestinal Health and Emotional Wellbeing in Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Science, Emilie Taylor-Brown.- Chapter 7: Visceralism and the Superior Mind in French Medicine and Literature, 17501850, Anne Vila.- Chapter 8: Digestion and Brain Work in Zola and Huysmans, Manon Mathias.- Chapter 9: Textual Ingestions and (In)digestions in Flaubert, Zola and Huysmans, Larry Duffy.- Chapter 10: Hygiene, Food and Digestion in Post-Unified Italy: Paolo Mantegazza's Medicine in the Kitchen and Beyond (1861-1900), Cristiano Turbil.- Chapter 11: The State and the Stomach: Feeding the Social Organism in 1830s New England, Molly S. Laas.- Chapter 12: Food Faiths: Gut Science and Spiritual Eating, Catherine L. Newell.