The Art of Not Eating

The day Jessica Hamel-Akré discovered the ideas of George Cheyne - an eighteenth-century polymath and London society figure known as 'Dr Diet' - it sparked an intellectual obsession, a ten-year study of women's appetite and a personal unravelling. In this bold and radical book, Hamel-Akré follows Cheyne through the pages of medical studies, novels and historical scandals, meeting ash-eating mystics, wasting society girls, impoverished female fasters and early feminist philosophers, all of whom were once grappling with nascent ideas around food, longing and the body. In doing so, she uncovers the eighteenth-century origins of both today's diet culture and her own troubled relationship with wanting. Blending history and memoir, The Art of Not Eating will change the way we look at appetite, desire and rationality, and show how it all got tangled up with what we eat.

Jessica Hamel-Akré is an award-winning historian of ideas, literature and medicine. An expert in the history of women's health, the body and feminist thought, she was a postdoctoral scholar in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Newnham College. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Montreal. Jessica co-created and presented on the BBC Radio 4 documentary The Unexpected History of Clean Eating.