Abstract
This chapter examines a series of essays on dietetics and digestive health by Walt Whitman in which he navigates the transition between humoral medicine and nutrition science. Whitman’s claim that indigestion is the “great American evil” threatening the health of the American body politic , and his claim that the healthiest diet consists almost exclusively of meat, are intimately connected. Whitman’s resistance to vegetarianism is best understood as a rejection of the Christian moralism that accompanied vegetarianism in the nineteenth century. In sum, digestion is political for Whitman insofar as healthy bodies require proper diet, while democracy requires a host of healthy bodies able to fully digest their food.
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Notes
- 1.
Rebrovick, “The Politics of Diet : ‘Eco-Dietetics,’ Neoliberalism , and the History of Dietetic Discourses.”
- 2.
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge; and, the Discourse on Language.
- 3.
Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” 279.
- 4.
Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy.
- 5.
Shapin, “‘You Are What You Eat.’”
- 6.
Scrinis, “On the Ideology of Nutritionism”; Scrinis, Nutritionism; and Shapin, “‘You Are What You Eat.’”
- 7.
Liebig , Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology .
- 8.
Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry and Its Relation to Commerce, Physiology , and Agriculture.
- 9.
Kant , The Conflict of the Faculties (Der Streit Der Fakultäten), 199.
- 10.
Liebig , Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology , 64.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Ibid., 70.
- 13.
Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry and Its Relation to Commerce, Physiology , and Agriculture, 74.
- 14.
Rebrovick, “The Politics of Diet : ‘Eco-Dietetics,’ Neoliberalism , and the History of Dietetic Discourses”; Scrinis, Nutritionism; and Shapin, “‘You Are What You Eat.’”
- 15.
Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie”; Levine, School Lunch Politics.
- 16.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.
- 17.
Brock, Justus von Liebig ; Finlay, “Quackery and Cookery”; and Finlay, “Early Marketing and the Theory of Nutrition: The Science and Culture of Liebig’s Extract of Meat.”
- 18.
Finlay, “Quackery and Cookery”; Finlay, “Early Marketing and the Theory of Nutrition: The Science and Culture of Liebig’s Extract of Meat”; and Rosenberg, “And Heal the Sick.”
- 19.
“Workers pressed animal flesh into a pulp with steam powered iron rollers. This pulp was then dropped into hot water, and steamed for one hour. The liquid was then allowed to ooze off into another vat, where workers removed the fat , and finally used heat and a vacuum evaporation pan to reduce the juice into a thick gravy . After several hours of cooling, the liquid was refiltered, packaged into small tins or pots, and reading for export.” Finlay, “Early Marketing and the Theory of Nutrition: The Science and Culture of Liebig’s Extract of Meat,” 58.
- 20.
Finlay, “Quackery and Cookery.”
- 21.
Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity.
- 22.
Graham summarizes his conclusions as follows: “Improper diet —the free use of flesh, with more or less of stimulating seasonings and condiments, together with coffee , tea , rich pastry, and compounded and concentrated forms of food; and too often, chewing and smoking tobacco , and drinking wine and other intoxicating liquors;—all of which unduly stimulate and irritate the nervous system, heat the blood , and early develop a preternatural sensibility and prurience of the genital organs” ibid., 152–153.
- 23.
Whitman, The Correspondence, vol. 7, 5.
- 24.
Turpin , “Introduction to Walt Whitman ’s ‘Manly Health and Training ,’” 148.
- 25.
Ibid., 149.
- 26.
Ibid., 159.
- 27.
Whitman, “Review of Liebig’s Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology .”
- 28.
Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 496.
- 29.
Whitman, “Manly Health and Training , With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” 184.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid., 209.
- 32.
Ibid., 210.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid., 209.
- 35.
Ibid., 185.
- 36.
Ibid., 271.
- 37.
Ibid., 184.
- 38.
Coleman, “Health and Hygiene in the Encyclopédie”; Rather, “The ‘Six Things Non-Natural’: A Note on the Origins and Fate of a Doctrine and a Phrase.”
- 39.
Shapin, “How to Eat Like a Gentleman: Dietetics and Ethics in Early Modern England”; Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine.
- 40.
Whitman, “Manly Health and Training , With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” 196.
- 41.
Ibid., 189.
- 42.
Ibid., 195. Emphasis original.
- 43.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality . Vol. 2: The Uses of Pleasure; Shapin, “How to Eat Like a Gentleman: Dietetics and Ethics in Early Modern England”; and Shapin, “‘You Are What You Eat.’”
- 44.
Whitman, “Manly Health and Training , With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” 197.
- 45.
Ibid., 212.
- 46.
Ibid., 307.
- 47.
Ibid., 197.
- 48.
Ibid., 201.
- 49.
Ibid., 269.
- 50.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality . Vol. 2: The Uses of Pleasure; Shapin, “How to Eat Like a Gentleman: Dietetics and Ethics in Early Modern England”; and Shapin, “‘You Are What You Eat.’”
- 51.
Whitman, “Manly Health and Training , With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” 203.
- 52.
Ibid., 306–307.
- 53.
Ibid., 225.
- 54.
Ibid., 221.
- 55.
Rabinbach , The Human Motor.
- 56.
Whitman, “Manly Health and Training , With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” 276.
- 57.
Ibid., 289.
- 58.
Rabinbach , The Human Motor.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
Whitman, “Manly Health and Training , With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” 243.
- 61.
Ibid., 281.
- 62.
Ibid., 268. Emphasis original.
- 63.
Ibid., 269. Emphasis original.
- 64.
Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, 152–153.
- 65.
Ibid., 156.
- 66.
Ibid., 163.
- 67.
Whitman, “Manly Health and Training , With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” 199.
- 68.
Ibid., 296.
- 69.
Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, 156.
- 70.
Whitman, “Manly Health and Training , With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” 197.
- 71.
Whitman, Walt Whitman ’s Songs of Male Intimacy and Love, 234.
- 72.
Whitman, “Manly Health and Training , With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” 269.
- 73.
Ibid., 223.
- 74.
Ibid., 225.
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
Ibid., 268.
- 77.
Ibid., 269–270.
- 78.
Ibid., 201.
- 79.
Ibid., 226.
- 80.
Ibid., 307.
- 81.
Ibid., 245.
- 82.
Finlay, “Quackery and Cookery”; Finlay, “Early Marketing and the Theory of Nutrition: The Science and Culture of Liebig’s Extract of Meat”; and Rosenberg, “And Heal the Sick.”
- 83.
Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 199.
- 84.
Ibid., 389.
- 85.
Ibid., 26.
- 86.
Ibid., 1033.
- 87.
Ibid., 495.
- 88.
Ibid., 496.
- 89.
Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry , in Its Relation to Physiology , Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and Political Economy, 181.
- 90.
Ibid., 973.
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Rebrovick, T. (2018). The Great American Evil—Indigestion: Digestive Health and Democratic Politics in Walt Whitman. 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_2
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