Rumbles, page 10
5 Brain Work
The secret to good health lies not in what you eat, but in how you eat it. According to a study from psychologists based at Birmingham City University, obesity is the product of chronic inattention.120 Distracted by phones, social media and television, we have, the researchers argue, become increasingly deaf to our stomach’s signals and unwilling to listen when it is telling us to stop eating. The solution, apparently, lies in adopting more ‘mindful’ eating practices. These include chewing each mouthful of food slowly, pausing in between bites, taking time to digest and, most importantly, ensuring that you finish your meal uninterrupted by online shopping or the latest Twitter spat. Despite being couched in the language of contemporary science – disrupted neural transmitters and the parasympathetic nervous system – this research concerns itself with a centuries-old problem: what if the brain and the digestive system were not only in communication with each other, but in direct competition? In the injunction to practise mindfulness at the dinner table, to focus solely on the acts of tasting, chewing and swallowing, lies the tacit assumption that activities that engage the intellect somehow impair the work of the body. Today we think about this problem primarily in terms of attention, with poor eating habits attributed to the modern information overload, but history offers up other models for understanding the relationship between the work of the gut and the work of the brain. There are, for one, different ways to think about the question of attention itself. Creativity, for instance, could be thought of as a product of inattention, really, of allowing the mind to wander hither and thither, unimpeded by the demands of concentration. Good ideas often come up over lunch, whether in conversation with friends or simply staring off into the middle distance between bites of a sandwich. And who can deny the worthwhileness of ice cream and daydreaming on a hot summer’s day?
Building on earlier discussions of the gut–brain axis, this chapter devotes itself to better understanding the connection between digesting and thinking. The two can often be found in semantic entanglement with one another: think of common phrases like ‘food for thought’ and ‘hungry for information’ or the way that bad news might be ‘hard to digest’. In Spanish the word tripas can mean both ‘intestines’ and the substance of a text, much like the use of ‘meat’ in English, and in French the expression donner du grain à moudre, to ‘give grain to the mill’, means to chew over an idea. Tracking meaning back and forth between the body and the social world, these expressions point to a version of the gut–brain axis that goes beyond the question of cognitive function. According to several early medical authorities, the digestive system was, at least partly, responsible for all the philosophy, music, art and literature that has ever been produced. For Galen, a pioneer in fields like anatomy, physiology, pharmacology and neurology, civilisation begins with the intestine. While the intestines of animals are smooth and straight, meaning that they must ‘feed continually and as incessantly eliminate’, the intricately winding coils of the human intestine permit us longer intervals between meals and bathroom breaks. And it is in those spaces between feeding and eliminating that, for Galen, culture happens. Along similar lines, the physician Avicenna, one of the great thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age and widely credited as the founder of modern medicine, argued that God had created the intestines and bladder as temporary stores for digested matter, so that we could attend to worldly matters without being continually interrupted by the need to defecate or urinate. Recast in these terms, the gut no longer appears as a distraction from intellectual business, rather it is the unlovely organ that makes it all possible. The belly, then, has not always been imagined as a hindrance to the mind, but the interactions between the two remain complex. Taking in the experiences of poets, philosophers and scholars of all stripes, this chapter explores how the life of the mind has been imagined in relation to the work of the gut.
For the psychologists at Birmingham City University, the disordered eating habits that plague the modern world are the result of mindlessly munching while scrolling through social media or staring glassily at rolling news, but long before the invention of the smartphone, physicians cautioned their patients against becoming distracted by the original hand-held technology: the book. At least as far back as the twelfth century, readers were warned against bringing books to the dinner table lest they disrupt the gut’s delicate operations. By the publication of The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621, the link between the act of reading and the threat of indigestion was well established, but its author Robert Burton went further to claim that the sedentary, solitary existence led by students also predisposed them to gastric disorders. A fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, who was an ordained Anglican priest and eventually a celebrated author, Burton was well acquainted with the toll that scholarly life took on body and mind. Having long suffered with dark moods, The Anatomy of Melancholy marked an attempt to better understand and exorcise those foul spirits; or as he put it, ‘I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.’121 Gathering the wisdom of Greek philosophers alongside the latest medical knowledge and his own observations, Burton concluded that melancholy was a product of both physical and mental forces. Unexplainable feelings of discontent or sadness were, for instance, said to be typically accompanied by ‘rumbling in the guts, belly ake, heat in the bowel, convulsions, crudities, short winde, sowrre & sharpe belchings’, which suggested some hazy connection between the intricate complexities of our emotional lives and the baser operations of the viscera.122 Moreover, though it had roots in the ancient world, Burton feared that in seventeenth-century Britain melancholy was becoming an almost ‘universall malady’, an ‘Epidemicall disease’ from which no one was immune.123 Those who read and wrote for a living were particularly vulnerable to low spirits. In a chapter devoted to the ‘Misery of Schollers’ he described how, at desks around the country, the twin evils of mental exertion and physical inactivity conspired to render their occupants depressed and gassy. Not only were scholars underpaid and typically underfed, but they were also prone to a range of debilitating ‘diseases as come by oversitting’ that included ‘winds and indigestion’.124 For Burton, this conspiracy of mind and gut arose from the movements of the humours, in the black bile secreted by the spleen and its negative influence on temperament, but new ways of conceptualising this vexed relationship would soon emerge.
Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the humoral body that we encountered in Chapter Three was slowly replaced with a body ruled over by the nervous system. This would have profound implications for how the gut was situated in culture. Beginning with the work of Thomas Willis, a London physician who credited their delicate filigree of fibres with producing all movement, sensation and thought, nerves became the object of medical and popular fascination. This was bolstered by the philosophy of prominent Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and David Hume, who hailed the nerves as not only physiologically essential, but also necessary to our appreciation of morality, beauty, emotion and spirituality. All facets of experience, every aspect of what it means to be human, were grounded, they argued, in the subtle play of the exterior world upon the carefully calibrated strings of our nerves. The danger, of course, was that this serpentine web of sensitive fibres could be easily discomposed, either by internal tumults or external influences. How could such a finely tuned instrument endure the sensory overload of busy city streets? Could it withstand forces of commerce and competition? Would it buckle under the strain? The consensus among many physicians at the time was that the modernising world exerted too much pressure on the nerves, resulting in a proliferation of diseases like melancholy, hypochondria and hysteria in the urban populace. These nervous conditions were hard to define and their exact causes difficult to identify, but they all involved the close interplay of mind with body. Symptoms might include heart palpitations accompanied by an impending sense of doom, extreme irritability exacerbated by persistent headaches, even manic energy combined with diminished eyesight. Gut troubles were particularly prominent, with special attention paid to the possible link between disordered eating and unsettled emotions. In the new nervous body, the stomach was recast as a key site of sympathetic exchange between all the other organs, meaning that the health of the individual came to be viewed as – to a quite remarkable degree – dependent on the success of the digestive process.
Considering that medical manuals from the period listed flatulence, belching, biliousness and constipation as its most common symptoms, nervousness was a surprisingly fashionable affliction in eighteenth-century Britain and Europe. Fuelled by early self-help texts like George Cheyne’s The English Malady (1733), which attributed them to the lure of civilisation, luxury and refinement, from the beginning nervous diseases were bound up with the aspirations of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie (Figure 13). The lower classes were apparently unlikely to be burdened by conditions like hypochondria and melancholy because of the simplicity of their daily lives: manual labour, plain food and plenty of fresh air produced a hearty constitution, while the luxuries enjoyed by the rich resulted in all manner of nervous complaints. To suffer with what Robert Whytt, another prominent doctor from the time, described as ‘an uncommon delicacy or unnatural sensibility of the nerves’ was to stake out an elevated position in the social hierarchy of the period.125 Physicians like Cheyne, who became a household name after the publication of his English Malady, recast nervous disease as culturally desirable and, in doing so, helped to create a thriving market of patients keen to identify with its newly flattering implications. The fashion for nervousness also elevated indigestion from a potentially embarrassing ailment to confirmation of the sufferer’s superior refinement. This was achieved, in part, by the connection drawn between the excesses of a well-to-do table – loaded with ‘Coffee, Tea and Chocolate’, with foods from around the world and dishes made irresistible by ‘the ingenious mixing and compounding of Sauces with foreign Spices’ – and the production of nervous symptoms.126 But it also involved characterising the respectable stomach as uniquely sensitive, an irascible organ fine-tuned to subtle shifts in diet, environment and mood.
Figure 13: The Scottish physician and early advocate of the meat-free diet George Cheyne. Line engraving by James Tookey after Johan van Diest, 1787
Beyond material wealth, nervousness could also indicate intellectual prowess; as Cheyne reassured his readers, ‘It is a common Observation (and, I think, has great Probability on its Side) that Fools, weak or stupid persons, heavy and dull Souls, are seldom much troubled with Vapours or Lowness of Spirits.’127 Rather, those engaged in the ‘Arts of Ingenuity, Invention, Study, Learning and all the contemplative and sedentary Professions’, were most likely to fall victim to the ‘Diseases of Lowness and Weakness’. This was because in the nervous economy, the work of ‘Study, Thinking and Reflecting’ wore on not only the mind, but also on the other organs and ‘faculties’ of the body.128 Using similar terms, in his Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (1798) the Scottish physician Alexander Crichton urged readers to beware the danger of excessive study, which was likely to impair the process of digestion and bring about a ‘sense of languor, anxiety, dejection of mind, peevishness, spasmodic affections, and all the consequences of a debilitated fibre, and [a] disordered state of nerves’;129 and earlier in the century, Richard Blackmore’s A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (1726) claimed that those plagued by chronic gastric discomfort usually excelled ‘their Neighbours in Cogitation and all intellectual endowments’.130 Physiological explanations for exactly why intellectual application weakened the gut varied, with certain medical thinkers arguing that sustained mental concentration drove blood to the brain at the expense of the stomach, some blaming the noxious vapours released by the half-ingested food lodged in the gut for upsetting the mind, while others claimed that, in fact, the trouble started in the mind, with overwrought sentiments and unnatural excitement placing undue strain on the delicate digestive apparatus.
Suffering scholars may have found relief in laudanum or opium, but they would likely also have been advised by their physicians to go on a diet. In his Haven of Health (1584) Thomas Cogan, who we met in Chapter Three, instructed students to avoid consuming ‘swines flesh’, as it is a meat only suited to bodies that ‘be yong, whole, strong, occupied in labor’, and instead stick to food ‘which is temperate of complexion, easie of digestion, and ingendereth good bloud’. The ‘weake stomack’ of the scholar was, he insisted, simply not equipped for the tough physical labour that a meat like pork demanded.131 For Cogan, the kind of work that the body performed in the world defined its essential physiology and as such good health could only be achieved by eating according to occupation. Working in the same tradition, in eighteenth-century Europe some physicians emphasised the value of plain foods, regular mealtimes and strict sobriety for those committed to the life of the mind. In his popular dietetic treatise Essai sur le alimens (1754) Anne-Charles Lorry cautioned that ‘Philosophy and the lifestyle it entails are the institutions of life most contrary to nature, unless exercise, sobriety, and regularity of conduct repair their defects’,132 while the Swiss physician Samuel Auguste André David Tissot warned those engaged in literary pursuits not to try to imitate the heavy diet of the ‘robust ploughman’ but to stick to easily digested fare like ‘light broths, niceties [and] jellies’.133 In common with Cheyne – who put himself on a strict diet after indulging in so much fine wine and rich food that he became lethargic, melancholy, unable to walk and eventually covered in ‘scorbutic ulcers’ – Tissot was himself prone to debilitating bouts of indigestion that he attributed to overwork. Like self-help authors today, they sold their advice based on a dramatic narrative of personal salvation made possible by a change of diet.
Whatever the treatment or its rationale, popular physicians like Cheyne flattered their readers by drawing a link between nervous infirmity, poor digestion and genius. As the lexicographer Samuel Johnson cautioned his friend and biographer James Boswell when recommending that he read The English Malady: ‘Do not let him teach you a foolish notion that melancholy is proof of acuteness.’134 Despite this warning, the connection persisted and was enthusiastically endorsed by the writers, poets and philosophers of the period. In a letter to his friend Sir George Beaumont in 1806, Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained that: ‘Whatever affects my Stomach, diseases me; & my Stomach is affected […] immediately – by disagreeing Food, or distressing Thoughts, which make all food disagree with me.’135 Coleridge, who suffered from debilitating bouts of ill health throughout his life (the finer details of which he was notoriously keen to share with friends, family and strangers alike), was troubled by a litany of digestive discomforts that included constipation, flatulence and painful wind.
Possessed by the same indigestion-inducing ‘blue devils’ we met in Chapter Two, Coleridge was one of the Romantic era’s best-known sickly poets. Romanticism – a literary, artistic and philosophical movement that reached its zenith in the early decades of the nineteenth century – was particularly enamoured with the figure of the sensitive genius whose intense mental activity wears upon the health of the body. Grounded in the observations of physicians like Thomas Trotter, who claimed in his A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807) that ‘it is to be supposed, that all men who possess genius, and those mental qualifications which prompt them to literary attainments and pursuits, are endued by nature with more than usual sensibility of nervous system’, illness came to be viewed as a mark of true creativity.136 According to historians Roy and Dorothy Porter, the growing prominence of nervous diseases in British and European medical discourse contributed to a broader fascination with the idea of the exceptional individual, set apart from the humdrum world and willing to suffer for their art.137 Romanticism, as a movement characterised by its emphasis on authenticity, its celebration of madness as a form of divine inspiration and its fascination with the mysteries of the unconscious, formed an important part of this cultural shift. Ultimately the melancholic temperament and disordered digestion that blighted Coleridge’s daily life also arguably helped to secure his place among history’s heroic artistic geniuses.
Excess gas and loose stools did not, however, guarantee entry into the Western literary canon, as historians James Kennaway and Jonathan Andrews have pointed out, because at the turn of the nineteenth century the ‘stock of scholars in the social order was often low’ and the ‘relationship between bad digestion, fashion and intellectual prowess was complicated by the contrast between gentlemanly sophistication and crabbed, obsessive and unrefined academics’.138 Distinctions between healthy and unhealthy forms of learning, worthwhile study and pointless intellectual tinkering were often made using the language of digestion. Judging whether a work of art is good or bad usually involves the question of taste, a concept that had long encompassed both aesthetic and gastronomic dimensions. In her study Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England (2020), Elizabeth L. Swann points to the way that gustation, the sensation of consumption and the experience of flavour on the tongue, has helped to shape culture. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she writes, the ‘relationship between physical and discriminative taste’ was ‘intimate and overt’, meaning that the processes of digestion were closely intertwined with the workings of knowledge and creativity.139 Examples of this symbolic exchange can be found scattered through the literature of the period. In William Shakespeare’s comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost (1597) Constable Dull is described as having ‘never fed on the dainties that are bred in a book/ He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink/ His intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts’, the implication being that his notoriously slow wits are the result of his reluctance to fully digest knowledge.140 Elsewhere, a character in Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590) vomits ‘bookes and papers’141 and in his Timber; or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641) Ben Jonson praises the true poet as ‘Not, as a Creature, that swallowes, what it takes in, crude, raw, or indigested; but, that feedes with an Appetite, and hath Stomacke to concoct, divide and turne all into nourishment’.142 The creation of great works of art and poetry was often likened to eating with manners and with good taste, a blending of physiological and aesthetic that positioned the work of digestion at the centre of literary life.
