Abstract
This essay explores the tropes and metaphors that make up the nineteenth-century literary and scientific aesthetics of gastrointestinal health, paying attention to the ways in which these frameworks blurred the boundaries between analogy and lived experience. This was a time apparently beset by the emotional violence of improper digestion, speaking to the recent term “hangry” to mean “being angry as a result of being hungry”, which too forwards a physiologically embodied understanding of anger. In the nineteenth century, this phenomenon intervened in debates concerning the interconnectedness of the gastrointestinal and psychiatric or neurological systems. From chronic indigestion to dyspeptic hypochondriasis, the lexis of violence was one of the many lenses through which writers strove to pin down the mechanics of digestive health.
Dr Emilie Taylor-Brown would like to gratefully acknowledge that the research leading to this publication has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), Grant Agreement Number 340121.
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Notes
- 1.
“Dyspeptic Saints ,” 26.
- 2.
“Dyspeptic Saints ,” 27.
- 3.
“Hangry ,” Dictionary.com.
- 4.
Peter J. Gurney, “Rejoicing in Potatoes,” 99–136.
- 5.
Boyce argues that “hunger is both material condition and cultural construct.” She explores the difficulties in representing working-class hunger to a middle-class audience in “Representing the “Hungry Forties” in Image and Verse: the Politics of Hunger in Early-Victorian Illustrated Periodicals,” 421–449.
- 6.
See, John Bohshedt, “Food Riots and the Politics of Provisions in World History.”
- 7.
“Dyspeptic Saints ,” 27.
- 8.
Fay Bound Alberti, This Mortal Coil, esp: 10–13.
- 9.
George Cheyne , The English Malady , i–ii.
- 10.
Cheyne, The English Malady , 149–156.
- 11.
Glen Colburn , “Introduction,” in The English Malady : Enabling and Disabling Fictions, 2.
- 12.
John Abernethy , Surgical Observations.
- 13.
Alexander Philip, On the Treatment of a More Protracted Case of Indigestion , 3–6.
- 14.
F. J. V. Broussais, Principles of Physiological Medicine, 525.
- 15.
Broussais, Principles of Physiological Medicine, 524.
- 16.
“On the Treatment of the More Protracted Cases of Indigestion ,” 405.
- 17.
“A Physician’s Notebook,” 343.
- 18.
[Advertisement] The Athenaeum, 343.
- 19.
William Beaumont , Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, 315.
- 20.
Beaumont , Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, 303.
- 21.
See, for example, [Classified Ad 29] Manchester Guardian (2 October 1897), 4.
- 22.
John Scott and John Taylor, eds., “Every Man’s Master,” 347.
- 23.
Also later: John Mitchell’s A Treatise on the Falsification of Food (1848), and Arthur Hill Hassall’s Food and Its Adulterations (1855) and Adulterations Detected (1857), which exposed the extent of the adulteration of food to the general reader. Following a year-long anti-adulteration campaign, “The Sale of Drugs and Food Act” was passed in 1875 and further amended in 1899.
- 24.
See also, Justus von Liebig , Animal Chemistry ; and Mark Finlay’s historical overview: “Quackery and Cookery: Justus von Liebig’s Extract of Meat and the Theory of Nutrition in the Victorian Age.”
- 25.
See, for example, Michael French and Jim Phillips, eds., Cheated Not Poisoned?: Food Regulation in the United Kingdom, 1875–1938.
- 26.
See, for example, James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain .
- 27.
David J. Hutson explores the ways in which body weight became a central concern in medical and popular spheres in “Plump or Corpulent? Lean or Gaunt? Historical Categories of Bodily Health in Nineteenth-Century Thought.”
- 28.
Joyce L. Huff , “The Narrating Stomach ,” 75–93.
- 29.
Sydney Whiting , Memoirs of a Stomach , vii.
- 30.
Whiting, Memoirs of a Stomach , 21.
- 31.
Edward Johnson , Results of Hydropathy, 102.
- 32.
Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail , “Introduction,” 1.
- 33.
Hisao Ishizuka , “Carlyle’s Nervous Dyspepsia,” 82.
- 34.
Charles Dickens , ed., “Stomach and Heart,” 439.
- 35.
Dickens, “Stomach and Heart,” 438.
- 36.
Dickens, Great Expectations, 45
- 37.
Dickens, Great Expectations, 111.
- 38.
Kerrie L. Schoffer and John D. O’Sullivan, “Charles Dickens : The Man, Medicine, and Movement Disorders,” 630.
- 39.
Dickens, Great Expectations, 104.
- 40.
Dickens, Great Expectations, 109.
- 41.
John Timbs, Hints for the Table, 7. See also: Beaumont, 315.
- 42.
Roy Porter , “Nervousness, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Style,” 31–50.
- 43.
“Kutnow’s Powder ,” 7.
- 44.
Margaret Harkness , In Darkest London, 66.
- 45.
Sally Shuttleworth , The Mind of the Child, 135.
- 46.
Shuttleworth , The Mind of the Child, 135–136.
- 47.
Harkness, 67.
- 48.
“One Volume Fiction ,” 413.
- 49.
Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau , Gout: The Patrician Malady, 143.
- 50.
Gail Turley Houston, Consuming Fictions, xii.
- 51.
S. C. Hall, ed., “Molly’s Dream,” 91.
- 52.
Andrew Coombe, The Physiology of Digestion , 243.
- 53.
“The Demon of Dyspepsia,” Judy, 307.
- 54.
George Coombe quoted in Jonathan Pereira, A Treatise on Food and Diet , “Appendix (A) pg 10,” 265.
- 55.
George Coombe , A System of Phrenology , 288.
- 56.
Combe , A System of Phrenology , 176.
- 57.
A Hypochondriac, “What to Eat, Drink and Avoid,” 379.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
“Dyspepsia,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal , 12.
- 60.
Mother Seigel’s Syrup [Advertisement], 2.
- 61.
“The Literature of Spiritualism,” 1518.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
“The Chimes: A Goblin Story,” 77.
- 64.
Charles Dickens , The Chimes: A Goblin Story, 79.
- 65.
Henry Sampson, ed., “Indigestion ! A Christmas Carol,” 252. Emphasis in original.
- 66.
See, Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming.
- 67.
See, Nicola Bown, “What Is the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of?,” 152–153.
- 68.
Sally Shuttleworth , The Child of the Child, 42.
- 69.
Stephen Heath , “Hypochondria : Medical Condition, Creative Malady,” 919.
- 70.
Cheyne, The English Malady , ii.
- 71.
George Rousseau has written on the connection between hypochondriasis and digestive complaint with reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in “Coleridge’s Dreaming Gut: Digestion , Genius , Hypochondria .”
- 72.
Anthony Todd Thomson , “Extracts from the Note-Book of a Physician—No. I,” 195.
- 73.
George Miller Beard , American Nervousness, vi.
- 74.
Thomson , Extracts, 196.
- 75.
Michael B. First and Allan Tasman, DSM-IV-TR Mental Disorders: Diagnosis, Eitology, and Treatment, 1002.
- 76.
John James , “ART I. An Essay on Indigestion ,” 4.
- 77.
James, 5.
- 78.
George Miller Beard , “The Extent of Insanity ,” 668–699.
- 79.
Thomson , “Extracts from the Note-Book of a Physician—No. I,” 195.
- 80.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu , “Green Tea ,” 58.
- 81.
Thomson , “Extracts from the Note-Book of a Physician—No. I,” 197.
- 82.
Richard R. Madden, The Infirmities of Genius , 153.
- 83.
Madden, The Infirmities of Genius , 155.
- 84.
“ART. II. – The Infirmities of Genius Illustrated by Referring the Anomalies of the Literary Character to the Habits and Constitutional Peculiarities of Men of Genius ,” 42.
- 85.
Oudenhove et al., “Psychosocial Factors, Psychiatric Illness and Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders,” 203–204.
- 86.
“Hunger ”, The London Journal , 424.
- 87.
“Dyspeptic Saints ,” 26.
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Taylor-Brown, E. (2018). Being “Hangry”: Gastrointestinal Health and Emotional Well-Being in the Long Nineteenth Century. 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_6
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