Why do we eat? Is it instinct, or some other impetus? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread in our culture, and scientists and physicians continue to have shifting theories about the phenomenon of appetite and its causes and norms. In Appetite and Its Discontents, Elizabeth A. 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. Williams argues that trust in appetite was undermined in the mid-eighteenth century, when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. Tracing nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite, 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.
Author(s): Elizabeth Williams
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 416
City: Chicago
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part One: Anxieties of Appetite: Created Needs in the Enlightenment, 1750–1800
Introduction to Part One
1. Why We Eat: The Ancient Legacy
2. “False or Defective” Appetite in the MedicalEnlightenment
3. Human and Animal Appetite in Natural History and Physiology
Part Two: The Elusiveness of Appetite: Laboratory and Clinic, 1800–1850
Introduction to Part Two
4. Perils and Pleasures of Appetite at 1800: Xavier Bichat and Erasmus Darwin
5. The Physiology of Appetite to 1850
6. Extremes and Perplexities of Appetite in Clinical Medicine
Part Three: Intelligent or “Blind and Unconscious”? Appetite, 1850–1900
Introduction to Part Three
7. The Drive to Eat in Nutritional Physiology
8. The Psychology of Ingestion: Appetite in Physiological and Animal Psychology
9. Peripheral or Central? Disordered Eating in Clinical Medicine
Part Four: Appetite as a Scientific Object, 1900–1950
Introduction to Part Four
10. Psyche, Nerves, and Hormones in the Physiology of Ingestion
11. Appetite and the Nature-Nurture Divide: Eating Behavior in Psychology and Ethology
12. Somatic, Psychic, Psychosomatic: The Medicine of Troubled Appetite
Epilogue: Appetite after 1950
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
