Appetite and Its Discontents

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

Elizabeth A. Williams

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226693040, 9780226692999
• eBook ISBN: 9780226693187
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

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

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• part one   Anxieties of Appetite: Created Needs in the Enlightenment, 1750–1800
• part two   The Elusiveness of Appetite: Laboratory and Clinic, 1800–1850
• part three   Intelligent or “Blind and Unconscious”? Appetite, 1850–1900
• part four   Appetite as a Scientific Object, 1900–1950
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index