Meat, Medicine and Human Health in the Twentieth Century

Christian Bonah, David Cantor, Mathias Dörries, Christian Bonah, David Cantor, Mathias Dörries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781848931039
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317323198
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This collection of essays explores some of the complex relations between meat and health in the twentieth century. It highlights a complicated array of contradictory attitudes towards meat and human health. They show how meat came to be regarded as a central part of a modern healthy diet and trace critiques of meat-eating and the meat industry.

1 ZOMINE: A TALE OF RAW MEAT, TUBERCULOSIS, INDUSTRY AND WAR IN EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY FRANCE

Ilana Löwy

In 1900 the French physiologist Charles Richet published a short paper which reported that a raw meat diet could cure tuberculosis.¹ The paper originated in a semi-accidental observation: a rapid improvement in the health of tuberculosis-infected dogs, fed with a large quantity of uncooked meat. Since the 1890s, Richet and his colleague, Jules Héricourt had tried to cure tuberculosis with a wide range of antiseptics and other substances. These experiments, conducted in a rather chaotic way, did not produce results, until Richet and Héricourt’s tuberculosis-infected dogs recovered. This was the starting point for Richet’s attempts to develop a raw-meat-based treatment against tuberculosis and related pathological conditions.²

In developing his ‘meat therapy’, Richet followed the steps of an earlier famous scientist, the German chemist and physiologist, Justus von Liebig (1803–73), one of the pioneers of modern theories of nutrition. In 1840, Liebig had developed a beef extract marketed under his name, building on a longer tradition which viewed meat as a major strength-providing substance, able to restore health. At least since the work of the French inventor, Denis Papin in the 1680s, physicians had proposed using meat extracts to increase the health of the working classes. Liebig added his scientific authority to this view, and his meat extract came to be considered a borderline product, part food and part drug. What Liebig proposed was that it should be given to soldiers to improve their resilience and fighting capacity, and to sick people to help their recovery. From 1865 onwards, the extract was produced on a large scale by the Liebig Extract Meat Company (Lemco). The enterprise was London-based, but the meat extract itself was manufactured in South America (mainly in the company’s Fray Bentos plant in Uruguay). In the late nineteenth century the company diversified its products adding a preparation of tinned corned beef, a cheaper version of Liebig extract named Oxo, and Oxo bouillon cubes – all substances used for cooking, but also to ‘restore forces’ to people weakened by illness or hardship.³

In some ways, Richet’s story seems to mirror that of Liebig. Like Liebig’s tale, Richet’s endeavour was in part a story of the intersection of science and commerce; how science was used to rationalize the medical uses of a meat product, and to promote its commercial exploitation (albeit without the success that Liebig enjoyed.) As with Liebig, Richet established his product at the intersection of meat and the military: the former promising to restore sick servicemen to the front; the latter providing a controlled population on which Richet could experiment. And, like Liebig, Richet situated his meat commodity at the blurry boundary between foods and drugs: Richet strongly argued that his preparation was neither a mere foodstuff, nor was it purely a drug – rather it was something that occupied a space somewhere between the two. Yet Richet’s story differs from that of Liebig in one significant point. As the paper will highlight, Richet not only considered that his ‘raw meat juice’ was something distinct from meat the food, but he also devoted considerable energy to distinguishing it from meat the restorative, including restoratives such as Liebig’s extract and Oxo. To understand why it was distinct, I suggest, we have to explore how it was embedded in a web of meaning that derived from Richet’s particular understanding of how his raw meat preparation worked in the body.

Charles Richet’s Raw Meat Therapy

Richet’s interest in a topic that linked food, physiology, healing and commerce is not surprising. Charles Richet (1850–1935) was a true polymath. Trained as physician and physiologist, he combined scientific activities with numerous cultural and political interests. Early in his medical career Richet became interested in phenomena at the boundary of physiology and psychology and he wrote his doctoral thesis on somnambulism. Working as a young researcher at the College de France, he collaborated with Jules Etienne Marey (1830–1904) and was influenced by Marey’s experimental approach. Thanks partly to his family connections (he was the son of a famous surgeon, Alfred Richet), Charles Richet had rapidly climbed the academic career ladder, and at the age of thirty-seven he was appointed to the chair of physiology at the Paris Medical School. In following years he became a member of the French Academy of Medicine and of the Academy of Sciences, president of the Society for Biology, and eventually Nobel Prize Laureate (he received the 1913 Prize in Medicine and Physiology for his studies of anaphylaxis). Richet was furthermore interested in socialism, pacifism and eugenics, promoted the development of aviation, and had a long-time interest in psychic phenomena and the paranormal. In his youth he pursued a literary career, writing numerous novels and plays. Abandoning his playwright activities in the 1890s, he nevertheless continued to write essays, popular scientific works and popular historical studies.⁴

Through one of his teachers, the physiologist Alfred Vulpian (1826–87), Richet became close to the founding group of the Pasteur Institute, and developed a lifelong interest in bacteriology and immunology. In late 1880s, he attempted to cure infectious diseases through transfusion of blood from immunized animals, an approach he named ‘hemotherapy’. Richet claimed that such transfusions protected sheep from anthrax and rabbits from sepsis through the transfer of ‘immune blood’. He tried then to apply this method to the cure of tuberculosis. His failed attempts to treat tuberculosis shortly preceded Behring’s and Kitasato’s successful serotherapy of diphtheria. While Richet – regretfully – acknowledged that, unlike Behring, he failed to grasp the general principle of the therapeutic use of immune sera, he viewed his ‘hemotherapy’ studies as his most important contribution to medical science. Until the end of his life he continued to claim priority for the discovery of the principals of serotherapy.⁵

An enthusiastic supporter of the ‘Pasteurian revolution’ in medicine, Richet never became a true follower of the Pasteurian method, and remained faithful to a more physiological way of thinking.⁶ Trained in the tradition of French physiology shaped by Claude Bernard, Richet combined an organicist point of view, focused on the understanding of the living organism as a whole, with a reductionist aspiration to uncover physical and chemical mechanisms that govern the basic phenomena of living entities. He was a dedicated experimentalist, an attitude that was not shared by the majority of his colleagues at the Medical Faculty in Paris.

Richet and Héricourt first observed a quasi-miraculous cure of a single tuberculosis-infected dog fed on an exclusive diet of raw meat in 1897. Richet explained later that the decision to feed dogs with great quantity of raw meat was inspired by the observation that tuberculosis is rare in people who suffer from gout. A diet rich in raw meat increased the concentration of uric acid in the blood and may, Richet speculated, hamper the growth of Koch’s bacillus.⁷ They confirmed this result on a few other dogs, and then rapidly started experiments on humans. In the mid-1880s Richet complained that he could not keep more than six or seven dogs at the tiny laboratory allocated to him at the Medical Faculty’s building. He decided therefore to rent, at his own expense, facilities in Jointville le Pont, near Paris, where he was able to keep over forty dogs at a time. This increase in laboratory space opened new possibilities for his studies on treatments for tuberculosis, including by changing the dog’s diet.⁸

The results obtained with TB patients fed raw meat extract were less spectacular than those seen in dogs. Nevertheless, Richet and Héricourt claimed that their method was efficient. The ‘zomotherapy’, as they had called the new approach (from ‘zomos’, meat broth in Greek) improved the health of patients with less severe forms of tuberculosis, although, alas, it did not help those with a more advanced disease.⁹ Richet and Héricourt described zomotherapy as a ‘specific treatment’ referring to specificity as an essential characteristic of a drug. Even if their notion of specificity remained vague in relation to their meat extracts, this qualification was intended to move their status from food to drug. Scientific explanations mentioned by Héricourt included the possibility that the meat juice neutralized bacterial toxins, favoured phagocytosis or, alternatively, was a ‘specific tonic for the nervous system’ strengthening the organism’s defence mechanisms indirectly, by stimulating the nerves.¹⁰ Richet proposed that substances present in meat juice fought infection either directly, through the neutralization of microbial secretions, or indirectly, through the induction of a ‘post alimentary leucosis’ leading to an improvement of ingestion of bacteria by white blood cells.¹¹

If Richet and Héricourt were not sure how exactly the ingestion of raw meat juice helped to fight an infection with Koch’s bacillus; they were persuaded that zomotherapy was a specific therapy which differed from general food products. In later years Richet acknowledged that zomotherapy was less specific in humans than in dogs and attributed this difference to the fact that dogs suffered nearly always from a ‘closed’ tuberculosis (the pulmonary lesions were delimited by a granuloma and thus circumscribed) while human tuberculosis was usually characterized by ‘open’ lesions (lesions without encapsulation from which tubercle bacilli were discharged out of the body). Nevertheless, he claimed that in patients with a ‘closed’ tuberculosis, zomotherapy was almost specific.¹² However, Rich-et’s claim did not settle the issue as other researchers in Richet’s laboratory, Albert Josias and Jean Charles Roux, questioned the treatment’s specificity. Following an attempt to cure tuberculous children with raw meat juice, Josias and Roux found that some of their young patients regained strength, but, rather than attribute these observed changes to the specificity of the treatment, they attributed them to a general improvement in the child’s nutritional status.¹³ Around 1902, Richet codified the regimen and dosing of zomotherapy, setting the daily ration of extract as at least one kilogram of crude meat and, in more severe cases, up to two kilos.¹⁴ Patients were expected to drink extract preparations equalling between 500 and 800ml of meat juice several times a day. Aware of the difficulty of making patients drink a large quantity of fresh meat juice, Richet proposed to aromatize it with bouillon or to mix it with a thick soup.¹⁵

In 1901 Richet gave a talk on therapeutic virtues of zomotherapy at the annual meeting of the association of Friends of the Sorbonne, and brought a cured dog with him to strengthen his argument. A member of the Municipal Council of Paris, Ambroise Rendu, present at that talk, was strongly impressed by Rich-et’s claim that he had developed an efficient cure of tuberculosis. With Rendu’s assistance, Richet was appointed in 1905 as the president of the administrative council of the Jouve-Rouves-Taniers dispensary for the treatment of tuberculosis. This dispensary had been founded in a working-class neighbourhood of Paris supported by a joint gift of 150,000 francs of Mrs Jouve-Rouves and Mrs. Tani-ers.¹⁶ Richet transformed the dispensary into a major site of experimentation with zomotherapy. The patients treated at Jouve-Rouves-Taniers received daily a fresh meat extract, but also a nutritive ration of approximately 1,500 calories. The treatment lasted usually three months, and was supervised by Jules Héri-court.¹⁷ Concluding results obtained during the first year of functioning at the dispensary, Richet claimed, showed that zomotherapy ‘cured’ about half of the 200 treated patients. He added, however, that the treatment did not eliminate the infection with Koch’s bacillus. Zomotherapy’s main effect was the restoration of the patients’ strength and their work capacity. Richet conceded that it was probably more accurate under these circumstances to consider therapeutic results as an ‘economic cure’ rather than a medical one. This was nevertheless an important achievement, stated Richet, since instead of workers ‘being a burden to their families, they are able to support them. Perhaps one should define this capacity as a true cure ?’¹⁸

The restoration of the patient’s ability to earn his living, Richet argued, was cost-effective for society as a whole. Although the price of zomine treatment was quite considerable, approximately 400 francs per patient, he declared it was nevertheless decidedly less onerous than an invalidity pension for a sick worker and his family. The dispensary, he added, fulfilled in parallel an important educative task: patients learned that tuberculosis was an infectious disease and were taught how to protect others, and to take care of themselves. Richet was proud of the results of zomotherapy at the Jouve-Rouves-Taniers dispensary but he also acknowledged that the development of tuberculosis in dispensary patients depended on both their general economic and nutritional condition. In the absence of untreated control groups it was difficult to distinguish between the therapeutic virtues of meat juice, and the effects of more general elements of treatment such as rest and adequate nutrition.¹⁹

This difficulty in identifying the therapeutic virtues of meat may account for the absence of scientific publications on zomotherapy at the Jouve-Rouves-Taniers dispensary. Another problem might have been economic. Zomine preparation and treatment were expensive and the dispensary lacked funds to maintain a treatment with high doses of raw meat juice for a great number of individuals over a long time. In the following years, Jules Héricourt, who replaced Richet as the head of the Jouve-Rouves-Taniers dispensary, treated tuberculous patients with only 125 grams of uncooked meat per day, in spite of the fact that Richet recommended a dose nearly ten times higher. Richet claimed that even this low dose had beneficent effects.²⁰ However, this claim contradicted his argument that other doctors failed to demonstrate therapeutic virtues of zomotherapy because their patients did not receive adequate quantities of raw meat juice.²¹ Despite Richet’s personal convictions and his scientif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• Part I. Meat and Therapeutics
• Part II. Meat, Politics and Culture
• Part III. Meat, Risk and Regulation
• Notes
• Index