Rumbles, page 2
Does the Gut Have a History?
Gut health seems like a peculiarly modern obsession. Alongside natural yogurt, fermented foods and dedicated cookbooks like Jeannette Hyde’s The Gut Makeover (2015) and Eve Kalinik’s Be Good to Your Gut (2017), it is now possible to undertake a faecal microbiota transplant – colloquially known as a ‘poo transplant’ or ‘trans-poo-sian’ – a procedure that promises to restore gut flora, reinvigorate the digestive system, help fight infection, and cure all manner of bodily ills. The growing demand for alternative therapies and the absorption of some of these into mainstream medicine – in 2022 Australia became the first country to grant regulatory approval to faecal transplants and others around the world show sign of following suit – speaks to the remarkably prominent position enjoyed by the stomach today. The organ’s ascent can be attributed, in part, to the work of individual scientists, the advent of new technologies and the emergence of dedicated academic fields like neurogastroenterology. Ground-breaking as these developments are, they do not fully account for the immense purchase the gut has on the modern imagination. There is something, as this book will argue, cultural at stake here.
Our current preoccupation with our bellies may stem, in part, from the fact that they seem to be giving us more trouble than they used to. Over the last few decades there has been a marked increase in the number of people recorded as suffering from chronic digestive problems. Inflammatory conditions like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are on the rise: research carried out by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found that in 1990 there were 3.7 million cases reported globally, a figure that rose to 6.8 million in 2017.9 A recent study by the European Parliament painted a fairly grim picture: digestive cancers represent nearly 30 per cent of all cancer-related deaths, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) afflicts a substantial portion of the population and yet remains stubbornly difficult to diagnose, and gastrointestinal disorders threaten to overburden healthcare systems in the future.10 Asked to explain these figures, experts have pointed to the possible influence of various factors from the overprescription of antibiotics and the use of personal sanitary products that kill all bacteria – good and bad – on the skin, to environmental toxins and the overconsumption of processed foods. The debilitating symptoms of conditions like IBS are, according to some, one result of the developed world’s attachment to extreme hygiene and detachment from the so-called ‘natural’ world. We have, it appears, discovered too late that the belly is a microbial garden to be carefully tended, not aggressively cultivated with pesticides and chemical fertilisers. The gut’s gurglings appear to speak directly to the concerns of the present: to the increasing incidence of chronic illness and worries about processed foods, to anxiety, depression, and the hope that the solution to highly complex problems might lie in simply eating better.
Yet by imagining the gut as a palimpsest onto which the concerns and anxieties of the present day are traced, we are following the example set by past physicians, politicians, writers and philosophers who were similarly confident that the organ revealed something unique about their time. From Puritan minister John Paget’s condemnation of the late sixteenth century as an era that put the ‘belly’ before spirit, to the seventeenth-century doctors who identified bad digestion as the price to be paid for their thriving civilisation, to the Victorian moralists worried that the stomach was ill-equipped for city living and the early twentieth-century psychoanalysts who interpreted alimentary anxieties as symptoms of the sexual neurosis engulfing modern society, the digestive system has often been called upon to encapsulate the tone and tenor of a particular moment in time.
Which is, in part, why it might be possible to conceive of the gut as something with a history. But if so, what kind of history might that be? Certainly, it does not align with the definition of ‘history’ offered by the Oxford English Dictionary as a ‘narrative constituting a continuous chronological record of important or public events’ and it cannot be said to have a history in the same way that major events like, say, the Reformation or the Second World War do.11 It could be argued, quite reasonably, that the organ is itself unchanging, that it is a fact of human anatomy whose consistency renders it timeless. Yet this would be to accept that not only does it have no meaning beyond the strictly biological, but also that the ‘biology’ of the gut has been understood in the same way across time and space. In truth, knowledge of what exactly the organ is and how it functions has always been subject to much contestation. Throughout the Middle Ages, for instance, the Latin venter was used to describe both the gut and the womb, so that the belly was both digestive and procreative; well into the nineteenth century physicians debated whether digestion was a mechanical or chemical process; and as we have already seen, what body parts are thought to constitute ‘the gut’ changes from context to context. Along with these shifting definitions, the images we have used to describe the gut have also changed. Today we speak in ecological terms – adverts for probiotics encourage us to nurture the microbial garden within – but in early modern Europe the stomach was imagined as being more alike to the bustling kitchen of a great country house, while eighteenth-century physicians fussed over it as a nervously afflicted invalid and through the Victorian period it was frequently condemned as an irascible foe, an enemy within implacably opposed to its owner’s comfort.
Bodies are more than just their biology, they are made by language, culture, environment, and a myriad of other possible components; they exist in a context and are defined by the fine peculiarities of that context. Moreover, disciplines like biology are also themselves historical, methods of enquiry that change across time and produce different versions of the human body along the way. In his book The Politics of Immunity (2022) Mark Neocleous proposes that not only does the body have a history, but also that it moves through distinct historical epochs. From the mechanical body conjured by new technologies in the seventeenth century, to the mimetic body provoked by the eighteenth century’s fascination with clockwork and automata, to the digital body of the twentieth century’s information age and the genetic body created by the twenty-first, scientific knowledge of the body is always formulated with other kinds of discourse in mind.12 Working from a similar premise, this book proposes that we can think about the history of the gut in two separate but related ways. Firstly, it argues that the organ itself has a fascinating history – involving medical breakthroughs, technological innovations, philosophical experiments, literary imaginaries and religious fervours – waiting to be uncovered. Secondly, it contends that though the story of the gut may not be that of the Second World War, it does reveal that what we tend to think of as the stuff of history – international conflicts, political revolutions, scientific discoveries – has often been bound up with the needs of the body and the demands of the belly.
In recounting the curious story of the gut, Rumbles draws from distinct but related fields of academic research: cultural history and the history of the emotions. It is possible to read this book as a history of medicine, but its focus lies not in recounting the lives of great physicians or rehashing tales of well-known breakthroughs, but rather with where medical ideas about digestion rub up against lived experience, spiritual values, art, poetry, folk beliefs, social ritual and customary knowledge. These areas of investigation are territories usually associated with cultural history, a way of looking at the past that attends closely to the shape and cadence of everyday life. As Raymond Williams, one of the pioneers of this approach to history, put it: ‘Culture is ordinary […] every society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning.’13 On the one hand, cultural history takes the ‘ordinary’ seriously: it examines what people ate, how they had sex, what they did for fun, what books they read, how they felt about family life and so on, with the aim of coming to some understanding of what it was to live a life in a time other than our own. On the other hand, however, cultural history also resists the truism that people in the past were ‘just like us’ by making strange the commonplace, the natural and the taken for granted. When, for instance, we learn that the concept of childhood has changed dramatically over the last four hundred years, from the pre-industrial world where the transition to adulthood began at age six to the modern day where the right to be considered a child until sixteen is enshrined in law, then something that might have seemed immutable suddenly reveals itself to be contingent. Rumbles harnesses this same revelatory power to make us look again at the seemingly unremarkable, unchanging work of the digestive system and to perhaps spot something unexpected or perplexing there.
The history of the gut is also an emotional one. Much of our current enthusiasm for the organ has been generated by emerging insights from the world of science into the role it might play in shaping our emotional lives. Recent studies into neuroendocrine signalling have identified the microbiome as a key site of the production of so-called ‘happy hormones’ like dopamine and serotonin, while other experiments have explored the psychosomatic origins of common gastric conditions like IBS, whose sufferers often report depression, stress or anxiety alongside abdominal pain, bloating and discomfort.14 This research, though innovative in other ways, relies on an understanding of emotions as straightforward biological reflexes, consistent across time and space. The history of emotions, a discipline in ascendancy over the last two decades, offers a different way of thinking about the relationship between mind and belly.15 Interpreting emotions as historical constructs rather than universal constants, scholars working in this field have explored how our embodied experiences are shaped by social pressures, cultural influences, intellectual fashions, religious practices and political whims.
Taking a similar approach, this book complicates the dominant biomedical version of the gut–brain connection, suggesting instead that because this relationship has been largely conceptualised outside of the realm of scientific research – by literature, art, etiquette books, self-help guides and even demonology – it might be better approached using the interpretative tools of the historian. Mapping the curious history of the gut, Rumbles seeks to influence scientific research by drawing attention to the importance of terminology, imagery and metaphor in shaping our conception of the body, and by pressing those committed to exposing the link between digestion and the emotions to consider how the historical nature of terms like ‘happiness’, ‘sadness’ and ‘anxiety’ might complicate any simple understanding of that connection. This is with the aim, in part, of fostering a more varied, more expressive, more emotional language of the gut, that might better encompass our shifting relationship to diet, digestion and waste. Throughout history the gut has exercised more of an influence on how we have structured knowledge of ourselves and the world around us than we previously thought.
Emotions, Work, Time and Politics
The story Rumbles wants to tell is, in one sense, a broad one that traverses a lengthy period from the ancient world to the present day, calling upon a polyphony of different images, texts and ideas to unearth the complex history of the gut. It is also, however, fairly conservative in geographical terms, rarely straying far from Britain, continental Europe and North America. This narrow focus is partly a product of authorial expertise, or rather lack of expertise, regarding the complex histories of the rest of the world, but it is also because there is something quite specific about the way eating, digesting and defecating came to be entangled with identity in the Western world. At the heart of this book is a fascination with the way digestion, as a bodily process, metaphor and cultural discourse, has helped to make the modern self. For instance, it explores the way that conceptions of nationhood and subjecthood have been formed through the work of the gut. Citizenship has long been connected to consumption and digestion in unexpected ways: consider, for example, the role of certain foods in shaping national identity – steak and chips in France or roast beef in England – or the way that perceived outsiders are demarcated as such with regard to their culinary methods. Going further, we might also consider the self-regulating practices that conflate dietary control with national fitness or the way ideas about purity traffic between the alimentary and the moral, or how taboos around bodily waste have so often been used to divide the ‘civilised’ world from the ‘primitive’. Cultural practices and shared narratives around the gut have long been used to bolster the West’s sense of itself as exceptional and superior.
The gut also troubles individual and collective vanities. Case in point is Darwin’s unfortunate young patient, whose burbling bowel brought her into daily conflict with the societal expectations of the period. She may have been as meek and politely spoken as befitted a girl of her class, but her stomach was a boorish loudmouth whose unruliness threatened to undermine its owner’s careful performance of proper ‘femininity’. Many of the tales collected in this book feature guts that refuse to behave. From the third-century philosopher who warned that the stomach was uniquely vulnerable to demonic possession and the medieval doctors who fretted over the poisonous vapours fermenting in the depths of the bowel, to the Romantic poets plagued by the bowel’s melancholy ‘blue devils’ and the nineteenth-century office workers brought low by the perils of indigestion, the gut has been consistently depicted as unpredictable and ungovernable. With this in mind it is perhaps not surprising that our relationship to the organ has so often been characterised as a struggle for control. The alimentary tract may be, as Gershon has it, a ‘tunnel that permits the exterior to run right through us’, but it is one with closely guarded entrances and exits. The management of these portals, what is permitted into the body and what must be expelled from it, is an activity fraught with social pressure. Consider the opprobrium levelled at ‘unhealthy’ eating habits or the proliferation of taboos around the toilet: digestion is a process that comes heavily weighted with anxieties around self-discipline, individual agency, and the degree of control it is possible to exercise over our bodies. This book is interested, then, not only in how digestion has helped to shape the self, but also in all the ways that it has threatened to unmake it.
Rumbles begins its curious journey through history with the mind. Modern science has, as we have seen, devoted itself to uncovering the mysteries of the gut–brain axis, but the idea that the belly might have some part in the life of the mind is far from new. Medical thinkers from Ancient Greece onwards have insisted that the stomach is the true source of our emotions, others have held the digestive system responsible for bad mood and some have blamed our passionate tumults for pangs of gastric distress. Over centuries of philosophical tracts, religious treatises, scientific research, dietary advice and poetical musings, the organ becomes implicated in conversations that seem, at first glance, far removed from its workings. Across several chapters, this book explores the role played by the gut in debates concerning the relationship between the immortal soul and the mortal flesh, what it means to be ‘civilised’, where intelligence resides in the body and the nature of consciousness itself.
Thinking about the mind, then, has often involved investigating the stomach, but it is not the easiest organ to examine. Not only is it buried far down in the viscera away from impertinent fingers and prying eyes, it also only really makes sense when it is in motion. Unlike other organs that hold their shape when they are removed from a dissected cadaver like the heart and the liver, the stomach quickly comes to resemble a deflated carrier bag. It is defined by the toil of digestion, by the steady labour of peristaltic waves moving food from mouth to intestine. This goes some way to explaining why it has so often been characterised as the ‘worker’ of the body or had its operations and functions understood in relation to the world of work. Moving on from the emotions, Rumbles spends several chapters with the history of the working gut. Starting with an enquiry into how the literal ‘work’ of the stomach has been imagined and the technologies that have been developed to witness it in action, the book then considers the sometimes fraught relationship between the work of the brain and the work of the stomach, before examining how concerns over the possible link between white-collar labour and gastric distress came to define the modern workplace.
The gut is entangled with the history of work and nowhere is this more obvious than in the question of lunch. In addition to telling the story of the midday meal, beginning with its origins in nineteenth-century Britain, Rumbles also argues that the institution of lunchtime is itself significant. The institution of a set hour of the day to eat speaks to the broader standardisation of daily time, a process that gathered pace during the Industrial Revolution where it extended beyond the production line to the body of the worker. Regulated breaks – hard won by union activism – established a particular rhythm for the digestive system but, as the following chapters explore, the stomach has a relationship to time that extends beyond the Victorian factory. From ancient Babylonia, where it was possible to glimpse the future in the entrails of sacrificed virgins, to the evolutionary biologists who condemned the stomach as a primitive vestige lurking in the modern body, the gut has often been framed in temporal terms.
Examining its past, present and future, it quickly becomes clear that the time of the gut is no neutral matter. Indeed, how we think about the tempo of the digestive process and its products is often bound up in the broader politics of gender, race and class. Taking up the gut as a political organ, the closing chapters of this book examine where the inner workings of the body rub up against the institutions of the state: from the role of the stomach in shaping the body politic to the actions of hunger-striking suffragettes who harnessed the gut to demand the right to vote. Beyond the empty stomachs that have driven revolutions and shaped world-changing events, Rumbles is also fascinated by – to use a term coined by the American food historian Frederick Kaufman – ‘gastropolitics’, namely the way that the language of appetite and digestion has come to shape our thinking around what is virtuous, moral and valuable, and what is not.16 This is especially visible in the history of dieting and in the loaded language that gathers around the ‘issue’ of weight. Digging into the persistent characterisation of the ‘fat’ belly as a disruptive, unruly organ, the closing chapters of this book reflect on the gut’s connection to acts of political disobedience and bodily rebellions.
