History of the Body

Willemijn Ruberg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350307469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historiografía

The body has come to occupy a central place in cultural history, with historians consistently exploring such themes as the history of disease, disability, beauty, and sexuality. This engaging and concise book offers a clear introduction to the history of the body, introducing a wide array of conceptual approaches to the field. It delineates the topic of body history and its origins in cultural history and gender history, distinguishing it from related disciplines such as the history of the self, the history of medicine, the history of emotion and gender history. Bringing in a wealth of thought-provoking examples from historical writing, it goes on to explore a range of themes, including racism, anorexia, gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis and agency. With further reading and explanations of key concepts provided throughout, this wide-ranging yet accessible text is the first introductory book to address this vibrant field from a theoretical perspective. It is ideal for students of historiography, medical history or the history of the body.

1 Body, Mind, and Self: Historical Perspectives

▶ Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the main developments in the history of the human body, with the focus lying not on material changes in the body as in daily experience, or on socio-economic trends in health, poverty, and disease, but rather on cultural images of the body. Since it is impossible to be exhaustive, several choices have been made: first, I highlight important continuities, such as humoral theory, which originated in antiquity and continued to be of vital importance in making sense of the body until around 1900; second, I underline striking differences between body images in consecutive periods. Where these differences are concerned, special attention will be paid to the modern body and its relationship with the notions of mind and self.

▶ The body in antiquity and the Middle Ages

Several ideas and practices relating to the body that were established in antiquity had a long-lasting influence on the early modern and modern periods. In our modern imagination, the Olympic Games loom large; revived in 1896, they reach back as early as the eighth century BCE. These Games were known for their admiration of the male, athletic body and are seen as the start of ‘the cult of the nude body as an icon of power and social rank.’¹ In the eighteenth century, influenced by recent archaeological excavations, scholars such as the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1718–1768) started to define the ancient Greek statues of male bodies as models of beauty.

More influential for the view of the body from antiquity to the nineteenth century, however, was the theory of humours. Ancient authorities such as the Greek Hippocrates of Cos (c. 460–c. 370 BCE), regarded as the father of western medicine, and Galen of Pergamon (c. 130–c. 210 CE), who served as personal physician to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, formulated ideas on the internal workings of the body that remained popular among doctors and laypeople until the nineteenth century. Their worldview revolved around the humours: four fluids (phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood) dispersed unequally among people. Some bodies produced more black bile, giving rise to melancholy, while other bodies consisted mostly of phlegm, causing an apathetic character (the word phlegmatic stems from this humoralism). An excess or deficit of these humours was thought to lead to disease; thus the key lay in balance, to be attained via bloodletting, emetics (potions that cause vomiting), and purges.

Generally, ancient medicine was entwined with natural philosophy, sharing the subject matter of the body and its parts and fluids, including its elements of earth, air, fire, and water and its qualities such as hot, cold, wet, and dry. In the literature of classical antiquity disease was regarded as the natural condition, and health as the exception. Health could be achieved through a careful management of regimen (such as a proper diet and exercise), while disease continually threatened the body both from the outside and from within.²

These ideas on health and disease, in connection with humoral theory, formed the most important continuity between ancient and medieval thinking on the body. However, in the Middle Ages other views of the body were added to humoral theory. Firstly, the Middle Ages saw the elaboration of the ancient notion of the universe as a macrocosm (the heavens), and the human body as a corresponding microcosm (humans and the natural world). From the twelfth century on, medieval medicine and natural philosophy, drawing on ideas from translations of classical and Arabic texts, imagined the human body as interconnected with the stars, seasons, and elements. The moon, for example, was believed to make nails and hair grow. At least in scholarly work, the connections between microcosm and macrocosm were widespread.³

Secondly, the later Middle Ages brought the rediscovery of human anatomy. Dissections of human bodies had been carried out in Alexandria in the third century BCE, but the practice had been abandoned.⁴ There were several motives for examining the inner parts of the body, Katharine Park claims in her study of the revival of anatomical dissection in later-medieval northern Italy. Apart from medical and forensic interests, dissection could also be prompted by spiritual motives. After the death of Chiara of Montefalco (d. 1308), for example, her fellow nuns opened up her body in search of physical signs of her saintliness. They found a crucifix in her heart and three stones in her gallbladder, which were identified with the Trinity. Park demonstrates that anatomical dissection was used not only to determine the cause of death, but also to assess disease and its possible implications for the heirs of upper-class families, with women often taking the initiative.⁵

Thirdly, the Middle Ages witnessed the growing impact of Christianity, though its precise influence on the medieval view of the body has been heavily debated. Christianity’s sway over views of the body was particularly strong in relation to sexuality. Christian commentators increasingly distinguished natural from unnatural sexual activity, the former referring to reproduction. However, sex was only tolerated within the bounds of marriage, as a control for lust, while chastity was the ideal. Peter Brown has demonstrated that in Christian groups in the late Roman world, practices of sexual renunciation, continence, and celibacy were paramount.⁶ Virginity, moreover, was widely recognized as a mental and spiritual condition, as well as a physical one. Consequently, medieval virginity meant the renunciation of all forms of sexual activity, including masturbation and impure thoughts.⁷

It is commonly thought that Christianity opposed a pure soul to sinful flesh. This dichotomy between body and mind could lead either to a view of the sinful body hindering the spiritual progress of Christians or to the idea of the body as a holistic unit whose coherence was guaranteed by Christian faith.⁸ Historians of Christianity, however, have pointed out that the body was often seen as inseparable from the soul, for instance when martyrs used their empathic bodies to feel the presence of God and to convey his love to others, or when mystics claimed to touch and embrace God with their bodies, or even to breastfeed him or have sex with him. Christian traditions like the veneration of the wounds of Christ and of the Virgin Mary’s role as a nursing mother stemmed from the Middle Ages.⁹ Therefore Samantha Riches and Bettina Bildhauer state that ‘many medieval religious models combined the idea of the body as earthbound and distinct from the soul with an understanding that the body could access the transcendental and was in actuality inseparable from the soul.’¹⁰

Similarly, Christian views on death complicate a simple body-mind dichotomy. On the one hand, in Christian theology death was seen as the moment when soul and body were separated, the soul going to heaven, hell, or purgatory, while the body rotted in the grave. Body and soul were then reunited at the Last Judgement, when the person acquired a new body. On the other hand, many people saw more continuity between life and death: the material process of cooling and drying applied not only to the living, humoral body, but also to the corpse in a tomb. It was believed that the corpse would continue to feel and move, even after burial, a belief which surfaces in the idea that the corpse of a murder victim bled when the murderer came near, thus revealing the killer.¹¹

Medievalist Caroline Bynum also nuances the idea that medieval Christianity revolved around a simple body-mind dualism. Bynum argues that a threefold categorization was used: body (corpus), spirit (animus or spiritus), and soul (anima). Discussions in late medieval philosophy, furthermore, drew a sharper distinction between levels of soul than between soul and body.¹² Specifically, Bynum focuses on the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh, in the period between the third and fourteenth centuries. The late antique and medieval authors Bynum discusses regarded the body as a locus of eating, digestion, and excretion, and the human cadaver as a place of putrefaction. In this era, death and bodily disintegration were inextricably connected to the Christian view of the body. Since the body was changeable, constantly eating and being eaten – by worms after death for example – as well as growing and decomposing, Christian authors wondered what exactly constituted human personhood over time. Medieval theologians debated the state of the immortal body after resurrection: Would bodies that had limbs amputated during life be restored to corporeal integrity at the Day of Judgement? And what happened to cut hair, fingernails, and aborted foetuses? The doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh was, according to Bynum, formulated to reassure those afraid of the undermining of human identity by biological processes. Nevertheless, in these doctrines body and soul were not separated: the self was not associated merely with the soul. After death, body and soul were connected and together constituted the human self. The resurrected body was immortal and idealized, and at the same time grounded in individual and unique markers of sex, social status, and religious affiliation. Bynum argues that it is this medieval conception of the resurrected body as unique and intrinsic to the self that influenced modern conceptions of the relationship between body and self:

The idea of person, bequeathed by the Middle Ages to the Modern World, was not a concept of soul escaping body, or soul using body; it was a concept of self in which physicality was integrally bound to sensation, emotion, reasoning, identity – and therefore finally to whatever one means by salvation. Despite its suspicion of flesh and lust Western Christianity did not hate or discount the body. Indeed, person was not person without the body, and body was the carrier or the expression […] of what we today call individuality.¹³

In the High Middle Ages, so Bynum argues, a greater confidence in the relationship between the self and the physical body surfaced. The sacrament of the Eucharist, for instance, claimed that Christ’s body remained whole regardless of the multiple consumption of the host by communicants. Similarly, the bodies of saints, nobles, and prelates were now seen as having a wholeness in spite of being partitioned: their body parts were distributed to different places after death because these parts would keep radiating the person’s magical power. Such relics were thought to allow access to the divine and to offer protection. A saint’s finger was seen to represent his full self, not just a part of his body, and saints’ corpses were venerated accordingly. Bynum’s work thus highlights both the magical aspects of the medieval body and corpse and those connections between body and self that point to ‘modernity’. It underlines that medieval Christian thought is more complicated than the notion of body–mind dualism can allow for.

▶ The body in the early modern period

Ideas on the body in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period show a great deal of continuity. Humoral theory continued to be the basis of interpretations of health, disease, and bodily difference. At the same time, new conceptions of the body were presented. On the one hand, these derived from discoveries by physicians and scientists. In 1543 the Flemish anatomist and physician Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) published On the Fabric of the Human Body, a book based on personal observation of corpses and living bodies and partly criticizing ancient authorities such as Galen. Vesalius’ magnum opus is regarded as one of the foundations of modern observational science and anatomy.¹⁴ Other important landmarks in the history of medicine included the discovery of the system of blood circulation to the heart and brain by English physician William Harvey (1578–1657), as described in his 1628 book On the Motion of the Heart and Blood. Works like those written by Vesalius and Harvey marked the start of the demise of the influence of ancient medicine.¹⁵

On the other hand, natural philosophy also made its contribution to theorizing the body anew. Famously, philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) privileged rational subjectivity, or the thinking being (‘Cogito ergo sum’. ‘I think therefore I am’), and separated the thinking mind from the body. This so-called Cartesian dualism implied that subjectivity became disembodied, and the body became regarded as a machine.¹⁶ This turn to a new dualism of body and mind has been traced beyond philosophy and science. Jonathan Sawday argues that the Renaissance witnessed a new culture of dissection, which was strongly connected with the imaginative arts. Anatomy was not only depicted in famous paintings like Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632), but also drew the attention of laypeople, who flocked to attend dissections of executed criminals. This fascination with dissection led to a new view of the body, Sawday holds. Whereas in the early Renaissance, investigation of the body could not be separated from thinking about its soul or sensibility, this idea was gradually replaced by an image of the body as a machine: ‘As a machine, the body became objectified: a focus of intense curiosity, but entirely divorced from the world of the speaking and thinking object.’¹⁷ This was a shift from giving the body spiritual meaning to a new rationalism, which focused on its usefulness, a view which had taken root by the late seventeenth century.¹⁸

However, it is questionable whether these new intellectual views of the mechanistic body really influenced the interactions between people of all social classes. Due to the availability of primary sources such as letters, diaries, ballads, jest books, popular medical manuals, and court records, historians have been able to minutely sketch the ways common people thought about the body.¹⁹ Laura Gowing, for instance, has reconstructed the relationship between the body as a cultural construction and its corporeal experience in seventeenth-century England. Compared to modern ideas of the body, this period saw different body boundaries: mental and physical subjectivity were entwined, and subjectivity had a strong collective aspect, since the individual was embedded in tight social networks. Sex, pregnancy, and reproduction, particularly where women were concerned, were subjected to social control, by men but also by women, especially family members and married female neighbours.²⁰ Juries of matrons examined women’s bodies in cases of rape, infanticide, or the non-consummation of marriage.²¹ Women’s chastity was vital to social order, and hence women were encouraged to be sexually passive and to keep their bodies to the private sphere. At the same time, humoral theory stressed that vaginas were active, devouring organs, and sexually voracious women required an orgasm to conceive. As Gowing concludes: ‘The great power of early modern models of the body was their flexibility: alongside the process of professionalization the popula...