'Great and dangerous disorders': diet, disease, and disordered eating in early modern England
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: History Faculty
Abstract
This DPhil will investigate the significance of eating disorders in 17th-century English medicine. It will examine what 'eating disorders' meant to early modern people, before considering with which cultural meanings and anxieties they became entangled. It will therefore question the conventional depiction of eating disorders as a modern phenomenon, demonstrating that they were a significant source of concern in medical and moral discourse throughout the 1600s.
Falling within the fields of medical, cultural, and intellectual history, this research will provide new insights in the history of medicine, gender, and the body, interrogating historiographical assumptions and encouraging the reappraisal of neglected sources. This intervention will build upon my MSt thesis, which uncovered a 17th-century preoccupation with pica, particularly its sex-specific reputation. Where my MSt sought to expand existing historiography beyond a narrow focus on self-starvation, my DPhil will provide the first comprehensive investigation into early modern eating disorders including 'excessive', 'depraved', and 'diminished' appetites (Charleton, 1680).
This DPhil will set out to answer four related questions. What cultural narratives developed around eating disorders in medical and moral discourses? How were these same disorders diagnosed in practice? How did prominent cultural narratives influence the lived experience of sufferers, practitioners, and communities? And what was it that made eating disorders such fertile ground for metaphor? Approaching these questions requires a high level of definitional clarity, understanding how people discussed and defined eating disorders outside modern psychiatric categories. Existing scholarship has imposed modern definitions or argued that premodern people had no notion of disordered eating, which is portrayed as a consequence of modernity. Following my work on pica, I suggest a third approach, which contextualises particular 'disorders of appetite' (Charleton, 1680) or 'evil diet[s]' (Culpeper, 1662) as eating disorders according to the contemporary system of bodily health and digestion.
Existing historiography is limited in scope and approach. Whilst a small body of scholarship exists on self-starvation, other forms of disordered eating (such as pica or bulimia, both terms used by 17th-century physicians) have been neglected. Yet the arguments and issues addressed by these scholars provide valuable tools for dealing with the problems raised in my study. Particularly, I intend to follow recent works by Gutierrez and Garwood, who explore the embodied experience of disordered eating and use it to shed light on wider psychosocial tensions. My research will move beyond the debate about applying modern psychiatric categories to the past and provide a comprehensive investigation which is grounded in context and contemporary understandings of the body and its health, diet, and digestion.
I envision a wide source base taking as its starting point the extensive print literature of the period: medical treatises and compendiums, cosmetic, dietary, and recipe books, popular pamphlets, as well as imaginative works including play-scripts, poems, and sermons. I will make substantial use of physicians' casebooks, using case studies to interrogate the interplay between medical theory and practice. Additionally, I will read casebooks in dialogue with manuscript self-writings in order to recenter bodily experience and ask how individuals and communities negotiated disordered eating behaviours. This wide-ranging bibliography will enable me to undertake a comprehensive review of disordered eating, exploring medical theory, practice, and patient subjectivity to illuminate the prevailing cultural metaphors which shaped lived experience. With an interdisciplinary methodology and emphasis on intertextuality, my research will draw on anthropology, psychology, nutritional science, and literary criticism as well as archival source-
Falling within the fields of medical, cultural, and intellectual history, this research will provide new insights in the history of medicine, gender, and the body, interrogating historiographical assumptions and encouraging the reappraisal of neglected sources. This intervention will build upon my MSt thesis, which uncovered a 17th-century preoccupation with pica, particularly its sex-specific reputation. Where my MSt sought to expand existing historiography beyond a narrow focus on self-starvation, my DPhil will provide the first comprehensive investigation into early modern eating disorders including 'excessive', 'depraved', and 'diminished' appetites (Charleton, 1680).
This DPhil will set out to answer four related questions. What cultural narratives developed around eating disorders in medical and moral discourses? How were these same disorders diagnosed in practice? How did prominent cultural narratives influence the lived experience of sufferers, practitioners, and communities? And what was it that made eating disorders such fertile ground for metaphor? Approaching these questions requires a high level of definitional clarity, understanding how people discussed and defined eating disorders outside modern psychiatric categories. Existing scholarship has imposed modern definitions or argued that premodern people had no notion of disordered eating, which is portrayed as a consequence of modernity. Following my work on pica, I suggest a third approach, which contextualises particular 'disorders of appetite' (Charleton, 1680) or 'evil diet[s]' (Culpeper, 1662) as eating disorders according to the contemporary system of bodily health and digestion.
Existing historiography is limited in scope and approach. Whilst a small body of scholarship exists on self-starvation, other forms of disordered eating (such as pica or bulimia, both terms used by 17th-century physicians) have been neglected. Yet the arguments and issues addressed by these scholars provide valuable tools for dealing with the problems raised in my study. Particularly, I intend to follow recent works by Gutierrez and Garwood, who explore the embodied experience of disordered eating and use it to shed light on wider psychosocial tensions. My research will move beyond the debate about applying modern psychiatric categories to the past and provide a comprehensive investigation which is grounded in context and contemporary understandings of the body and its health, diet, and digestion.
I envision a wide source base taking as its starting point the extensive print literature of the period: medical treatises and compendiums, cosmetic, dietary, and recipe books, popular pamphlets, as well as imaginative works including play-scripts, poems, and sermons. I will make substantial use of physicians' casebooks, using case studies to interrogate the interplay between medical theory and practice. Additionally, I will read casebooks in dialogue with manuscript self-writings in order to recenter bodily experience and ask how individuals and communities negotiated disordered eating behaviours. This wide-ranging bibliography will enable me to undertake a comprehensive review of disordered eating, exploring medical theory, practice, and patient subjectivity to illuminate the prevailing cultural metaphors which shaped lived experience. With an interdisciplinary methodology and emphasis on intertextuality, my research will draw on anthropology, psychology, nutritional science, and literary criticism as well as archival source-
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Helena Aeberli (Student) |