Abstract
If the health of a society depends on its diet, how should it be fed? This question lay beneath debates in the 1830s about the proper alimentary regimen for the New England laborer. The controversy over which diet would ensure the health of the country’s workers pitted proponents of vegetarianism, led by the reformer Sylvester Graham, against advocates of meat eating, led by the physician Luther Bell. This essay shows how both Graham and Bell used comparative anatomy to argue for the naturalness and suitability of their preferred mode of diet. By linking the care of the body to the care of society, both figures placed gut health at the centre of debates about modernity, capitalism, nationhood, and the application of scientific inquiry to medical practice.
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Notes
- 1.
“Editorials and Medical Intelligence.”
- 2.
Paul Starr , The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 52; Adam D. Shprintzen, The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817–1921; and James C. Whorton , Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America.
- 3.
Ian Miller, A Modern History of the Stomach , 19.
- 4.
Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 34.
- 5.
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 22–28.
- 6.
James C. Whorton , Crusaders for Fitness, 27.
- 7.
Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet , and Debility in Jacksonian America.
- 8.
Miller, A Modern History of the Stomach , 12–13; Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet , and Debility in Jacksonian America.
- 9.
Sylvester Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life, 180–181.
- 10.
Graham, 1, 350–352.
- 11.
Ibid., 195.
- 12.
Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet , and Debility in Jacksonian America, 28.
- 13.
Martin Kitchen, Kaspar Hauser : Europe’s Child, 179.
- 14.
Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life, vol. 2, 298.
- 15.
Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet , and Debility in Jacksonian America, 133–134.
- 16.
It is possible that Graham had an opportunity to see an orangutan himself or read about it in the local periodicals, as a captive one was in Philadelphia in 1836. “Description of an Hermaphrodite Orang-Outang Lately Living in Philadelphia.”
- 17.
Sylvester Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life, vol. 2, 68.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, 30.
- 20.
Anne Vila , Enlightenment and Pathology, 187–188.
- 21.
Francis Moran, “Between Primates and Primitives: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau’s Second Discourse.”
- 22.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau , The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 193–194.
- 23.
Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life, vol. 2, 51.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Ibid., 137–138.
- 26.
Bloodletting and the mercury compound calomel were used to purge the body and “shock” it out of a humoral imbalance. Repeated bloodletting, and the administering of large doses of purgative drugs, was known as “heroic medicine” and was a subject of criticism by both orthodox physicians and alternative healers alike. See John Duffy, From Humors to Medical Science, 72.
- 27.
John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820–1885, 22.
- 28.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Luther Bell , and Robert W. Haxall, Dissertations on the Question.
- 29.
S. B. Sutton, Crossroads in Psychiatry , 58.
- 30.
Luther V. Bell, A Dissertation on the Boylston Prize-Question for 1835.
- 31.
Bell, A Dissertation on the Boylston Prize-Question for 1835, 4.
- 32.
John Ayrton Paris, A Treatise on Diet , 127; Christopher Hamlin and Kathleen Gallagher-Kamper, “Malthus and the Doctors: Political Economy, Medicine, and the State in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1800–1840”; and Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain , 1800–1854, 25.
- 33.
George Edward Ellis, Memoir of Luther V. His classmates at Bowdoin included the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the US president Franklin Pierce.
- 34.
Gerald N. Grob, Edward Jarvis and the Medical World of Nineteenth-Century America, 15; Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 36.
- 35.
Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America, 346–348.
- 36.
Isaac Ray, A Discourse on the Life and Character of Dr. Luther V. Bell; Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, 33–35.
- 37.
Matthew Warner Osborn, Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic; Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America.
- 38.
Bell, “An Address Before the Young Men’s Entire Abstinence Association,” 7.
- 39.
Bell, A Dissertation on the Boylston Prize-Question for 1835, 6.
- 40.
Elizabeth A. Williams , “Sciences of Appetite in the Enlightenment , 1750–1800.”
- 41.
Conevery Bolton Valenčius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land, 159–160.
- 42.
The name “Orson” in the title of the article referred to the medieval romance, Valentine and Orson, about twin brothers abandoned in the wilderness in infancy. Valentine is found and raised as a knight; he eventually locates his brother, Orson, a wild man in the woods, and tames him.
- 43.
Bell, A Dissertation on the Boylston Prize-Question for 1835, 20–23.
- 44.
Bell, A Dissertation on the Boylston Prize-Question for 1835, 12.
- 45.
Ibid., 7–12.
- 46.
William Lawrence , Lectures on Physiology , Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, Delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, 187.
- 47.
William Lawrence , Lectures on Comparative Anatomy , Physiology , Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, 184, 197.
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Laas, M.S. (2018). The State and the Stomach: Feeding the Social Organism in 1830s New England. In: Mathias, M., Moore, A.M. (eds) Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01857-3_11
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