Appetite in the Enlightenment,

7/28/2019 Appetite in the Enlightenment,

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Sciences of appetite in the Enlightenment, 1750–1800

Elizabeth A. Williams

Department of History, Oklahoma State University , Stillwater, OK, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Available online xxxx

Keywords:

Appetite

Dietetics

Foodstuffs

MedicineNatural history

Physiology

Ingestion

Digestion

Mechanism

Vitalism

Instinct

Experimentalism

a b s t r a c t

Advice about diet has been an important part of Western medicine from its inception. Although basedpartly on the presumed qualities and effects of foodstuffs, such advice rested chiefly on the constitution

and circumstances of individual patients, including their unique appetites and eating habits. In the eigh-teenth century the nature of appetite itself came to be a subject of growing interest in the sciences, espe-cially in medicine, natural history, and physiology. Within these sciences attention to the eating

proclivities of individuals began to be displaced by interest in uniform processes of ingestion and diges-tion. In turn dietary advice came increasingly to rely on general standards of health and the digestibility

of foodstuffs. Central to the promotion of uniform standards was the increasing credence given to exper-imental procedures that claimed to offer new certainties about the digestive process. As experimental sci-

ence took hold, appetite, long regarded as a perplexing blend of psychic and somatic elements, assumedsubordinate status as an object of inquiry to phenomena thought readily susceptible to laboratory manip-

ulation. These eighteenth-century developments stand at the origin of the modern nutritional sciencethat denigrates individual appetites in favor of universal rules of ‘healthy eating.’

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1. Introduction

Physicians in the Western medical tradition have always offered

advice about diet. The earliest medical writings, those that makeup the Hippocratic Corpus, established the foundations of medicaldietetics, and food and drink constituted a large part of the thera-peutic armamentarium of Hippocratic physicians. These early phy-

sicians also counseled patients on what to eat and drink in order to

preserve health, a theme taken up by Galen and indeed essential tothe Galenic medicine that remained dominant for centuries. Whatto eat was also a central question of the hygienic literature devoted

to ‘prolongation of life’ from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centu-ries. Yet while many Renaissance physicians saw medicine asallied, or at least compatible, with culinary arts bent on maximiz-ing pleasure in eating, by the seventeenth century medical advice

was marked by eating anxieties and by medical antagonismtoward gastronomic indulgence.1 Notwithstanding its often

heralded commitment to pleasure-seeking, the Enlightenment sawfretting about what to eat steadily mounting, so much so that bythe 1760s it was fashionable to draw attention to one’s constitu-

tional weakness and inability to digest any but the most delicatefoods.2 Through this long evolution, however, one feature of medicalcounsel remained constant: a healthy diet consisted of what wasappropriate to the individual based on his or her age, constitution,

and temperament; the influence of local climatic conditions; and,

not least, individual eating habits.

3

In this paper I argue that the later eighteenth century witnessednot only intensified anxiety about what to eat but also, in the

science of the period, a drive away from the individual focus of earlier medical counsel toward the view that food choices couldnot remain a matter of individual desires or tastes but, instead,must conform to general standards of healthy eating. Physicians

from Hippocrates to the eighteenth century had held that therecould be no absolutes in respect to diet: to be healthy, individuals

1369-8486/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2011.10.031

E-mail address: [email protected] Albala (2002), pp. 7, 31–35.2 Spang (2000).3 Passmore (1993), p. 170; Albala (2002), p. 6.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2011) xxx–xxx

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Please cite this article in press as: Williams, E. A. Sciences of appetite in the Enlightenment, 1750–1800. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and

Biomedical Sciences (2011), doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2011.10.031

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must consume what appetite urged them to eat. By contrast, inves-tigators of the later eighteenth century began arguing that, based

on the material nature of foodstuffs and the uniform operationsof digestion, certain foods were, for everyone, healthier and more‘digestible’ than others. Such studies launched a way of investigat-ing appetite and eating that by our own time has become virtually

unchallengeable as nutritionists seek to discern exactly which

foods, in which quantities, are supposed to be beneficial for every-one, largely in disregard of the appetite of the individual eater. Thispaper argues that this perspective on what to eat emerged from

eighteenth-century inquiries into the nature of appetite itself.Between 1750 and 1800 such investigations unfolded in a rangeof scientific domains and with the aid of diverse methods, but bythe end of the period investigators had begun to privilege experi-

mental methods that eschewed the complexities of appetite andclaimed to offer general truths about the effects of foodstuffs onthose who consumed them. It is thus to the later eighteenth cen-

tury, I argue, that the modern denigration of appetite traces itsorigins.

2. Appetite in clinical medicine and natural history

Understood broadly, appetite and the ‘appetitive’ have a historyas long as Western science itself. Aristotle identified the appetitive

sense as that which propels human beings into ingestive states andactions required for sustaining life—feeling the desire for food,looking for food, moving to locate and grasp food, ingesting food. 4

Similarly, Galen taught that bodily functions, including all those re-

quired for nutrition, respond to the goads supplied by innate organ-ismic ‘faculties’.5 By 1750, although much of the Aristotelian-Galenicframework had come under challenge, this way of viewing the body

as a whole, and the organs of ingestion and digestion in particular, asmoving into and out of appetitive states remained an essential fea-ture of the discourse of nutrition.6 Nonetheless, although this broad-er sense of the ‘appetitive’ remained important, I explore here the

more restricted usage of ‘appetite’ in the science of the period,

chiefly French but with some glances elsewhere. My focus is on clin-ical medicine, natural history, and physiology, the scientific frame-works that, as I see it, were to prove the most consequential in

shaping thinking about appetite.7

Practicing physicians first encountered talk of appetite in thecourse of their medical training, specifically in semiotics, the codi-fied science of signs that guided the diagnosis and prognosis of dis-

ease. Although less crucial than the ‘Hippocratic facies,’ appetitewas an important sign in Hippocratic teaching. At the beginningof the Prognostics, the ‘want of [desire for] food’ is included as oneof three signs indicating that a potentially mortal ill is ‘less to be

dreaded.’ In semiotics, references to the Ancients remained com-mon, and indeed one semiotician of the period asserted that Hippo-crates continued to be the surest guide to the interpretation of

signs.8 Jacalyn Duffin has recently shown the importance in semeiol-ogy of the handbook written in the mid-sixteenth century by theBrussels physician Jodocus Lommius. In Lommius’s Medicinal

Observations, which served as a vade mecum for physicians acrossEurope late into the eighteenth century, appetite was situated among

prognostic signs just after the pulse and just before bodily excre-tions.9 It was valued—along with such phenomena as ‘violent heat’or ‘intense thirst’—as one of the more obvious signs in contrast to ‘ob-scure signs’ that indicated, for example, ‘pestilential fever.’ Nonethe-less, neither Lommius nor semioticians after him tried to state justwhat appetite was; instead they used the term pragmatically—when

appetite was present or good, a favorable prognostic conclusion fol-

lowed, when it was lacking or bad the patient’s prospects weredoubtful.10 It seems, too, that at the bedside physicians judged thestate of the appetite entirely on the basis of the patient’s apparent

reaction when food was offered or mentioned, while saying little ornothing about how this reaction was to be assessed, whether, forexample, the patient in fact felt a certain way about food or was un-able to show interest in or ingest food for some other reason. By the

late eighteenth century Lommius’s ‘little golden book’ was super-seded by the formalized nosologies of the period, with their elaboraterecitals of the signs and symptoms distinguishing specific disease

entities. The most famous of these were the work of the Montpellierphysician François Boissier de Sauvages and his Edinburgh counter-part William Cullen. The goal of nosology was to identify specific dis-eases, with disease itself defined, in Sauvages’s language, as ‘the

assemblage of symptoms . . .mutually connected’ (Fig. 1).11

In this nosological enterprise appetite took on new importance:no longer strictly a sign, it was now presented as a phenomenonsubject to specific, identifiable diseases. Sauvages presented appe-

tite, along with imagination and judgment, as components of rea-son and thus classified ills of appetite not with bodily disorders butwith those that ‘trouble the reason.’ In his construction, then, thesemaladies included ills connected to the desire for food and drink

but also others associated with desires unrelated to ingestion. Thussome of Sauvages’s troubles of appetite, such as ‘canine hunger’and ‘bulimia,’ correspond roughly to modern eating disorders,while others were connected to love of one’s homeland, the desire

for security, and the sexual appetite (see Table 1).Sauvages did not devote extensive attention to any of the

‘bizarreries’ afflicting appetite. Rather, following his usual proce-

dure, he indicated his own preferred term for a given species of dis-ease, supplied alternate labels used by physicians Ancient andModern, and then offered brief descriptions that touched oncauses, symptoms, and treatment.12

Cullen’s nosology drew heavily on the prior efforts of Sauvages.

He too included ‘want of appetite’ as a symptom characteristic of arange of diseases (‘scrophula mesenterica,’ dyspepsia) whilereserving his principal discussion of troubled appetite to his fourthclass of disease, ‘Locales,’ in which he tried to identify diseases as

‘affection[s] of a part, not the whole body’.13 Cullen’s most extendeddiscussion of appetite appeared within the order of disease labeled‘dysorexiae’ or ‘false or defective appetite.’ It was here that he situ-

ated many of the ills Sauvages had termed ‘ bizarreries’ or ‘morosi-ties,’ including forms of anorexia, bulimia, and pica (‘a desire of

eating what is not food’). Yet although Cullen followed Sauvages inmany respects, he stated at the outset that the French nosologist

had erred in classifying these diseases among the vesanias whenthey ought in fact to be included among local diseases, ‘as almostevery species of Dysorexia is evidently an affection of a part, rather

4 Aristotle (1984), Kass (1994).5 Temkin (1973), pp. 89–90.6 Hall (1969), pp. 66–67.7 Despite much overlap in institutions, personalities, and methods, these approaches to appetite were distinct enough to warrant separate treatment; on unity and difference in

Enlightenment science, see the essays in Clark et al. (Eds.) (1999).8 Hippocrates (1788), p. 4; Anon. (1751–1765), vol. 14, pp. 937–938 .9 Lommius (1747), vol. 3, p. 23; Duffin (2006).

10 Sprengel (1801), pp. 352–355.11 Sauvages (1770–1771), vol. 1, p. 62; Cullen (1800), Bynum (1993).12

Sauvages (1770–1771), vol. 2, pp. 665–708.13 Cullen (1800), p. 154.

2 E.A. Williams / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2011) xxx–xxx



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than of the whole body.’ Thus he denied, for example, that the vari-ous forms of anorexia constituted distinct diseases, stating that

‘Every anorexia seems to me to be Symptomatic, and to vary onlyaccording to the disease it accompanies’. Still, Cullen was himself uncertain about where ills of appetite should be placed. This is evi-dent from the fact that even though his main discussion of appetitive

ills appeared with ‘local diseases,’ he also listed them among the‘neuroses’ (the term, of his coinage, designating nervous disorders).Furthermore, in discussing pica, Cullen made no judgment but sim-ply deferred to Sauvages (‘as I am not sufficiently acquainted with

the species of Pica, I give the following from Sauvages’). In the end,then, Cullen was unable to decide whether ills of appetite were men-tal or corporal, ‘whole body’ or local, ‘idiopathic’ (independent) orsymptomatic.14

Taken together, the nosologies of Sauvages and Cullen, the mostprestigious of the genre, indicate a divide in medical thinkingabout appetite that was to deepen from this point forward: wasappetite a mental phenomenon, as Sauvages asserted in defining

appetite as a component of reason, or was it a bodily phenomenon,as Cullen suggested when he criticized Sauvages’s inclusion of dis-orders of appetite within the class of ‘ folies’? In this fashion nosol-ogists approached, without doing much to resolve, questions thatbedeviled inquiries into appetite, not only whether appetite was

bodily or mental but also the therapeutic and moral question of

whether appetite was under the control of reason, judgment, andwill or, instead, a corporal phenomenon functioning largely outside

the reach of mental operations.While raising these issues the nosologies of Sauvages and Cullen

also suggested the types of appetite disorder that most concernedphysicians, especially the two extremes of under- and over-eating.

Given the enticements of late eighteenth-century food culture—thegreater accessibility of once luxurious foods and drinks (tea, coffee,sugar) and the increasingly sophisticated modes of preparingfood—physicians wrung their hands over the dangers of gluttony

and obesity and over the general ill effects of consuming over-refined foods and drinks (Fig. 2).

In her study of the English physician George Cheyne, AnitaGuerrini has shown that medical anguishing of this sort was wellunder way in the early eighteenth century, and others have dem-

onstrated that concerns about obesity and ‘nervous’ afflictionslinked to over-eating intensified as the century wore on.15 Lessoften remarked is the interest physicians took in other forms of

pathological appetite, especially the under-eating or refusal of foodprincipally seen in girls and women and the ‘bizarre’ or ‘monstrous’appetites that led some individuals to eat non-food or noxious sub-stances such as chalk, clay, dirt, and unripened grains or fruits.16

Thus physicians sought means not only to damp down the appetite

of over-eaters but also to stimulate a lost or failing appetite or to

Fig. 1. Portrait of François Boissier de Sauvages, Courtesy National Library of Medicine.

14 Cullen (1800), pp.162–164.15

Guerrini (2000), Dacome (2005), Vila (2005); Carel (1939).16 Starobinski (1981), Loudon (1980).

E.A. Williams / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2011) xxx–xxx 3









material’ interior sense, man was endowed with a ‘spiritual sub-stance’ whose guidance was not automatic but instead unfoldedin accord with the dictates of specifically human capacities of

imagination and passion, judgment and reason. In this differencelay not only human nobility but also the source of human error

and suffering. ‘Deranged by passion,’ or enticed by imagination,itself made possible by the strictly human capacity to compare

remembered sensations, human beings sought to increase theirpleasures beyond what ‘nature’ provided in abundance and in sodoing brought on themselves miseries born of unwonted desire,excess, and debauchery. By this means Buffon arrived at the

paradox that although human beings were superior to animals in‘dignity,’ they were inferior to animals in health.25 Human beingsknew far more illness and physical suffering than animals becauseof both the agitation caused by the search for pleasure and the

uncertainty, in humans, of the sensory powers connected to needand appetite. In this fashion, then, Buffon’s reflections on natural his-tory joined the terrain of the clinical physician who charted vagaries

of appetite and the physiologist who attempted in ways markedlydifferent from his to explain the nature of the appetitive function.

3. Appetite and the physiologists

In exploring the nature of appetite, physiologists of the era1750–1800 shared with Buffon the complex vocabulary of sensa-tion, the sensory, sentiment, and sensibility derived from philo-sophical sensationalism.26 Nonetheless, their goals differed fromBuffon’s: while he was intent on mapping differences in human

and animal nature and on charting the appetites of varied species,physiologists sought to understand appetite as part of the larger pro-cesses of ingestion, digestion, and nutrition. Given the medical foun-dations of physiology, moreover, knowledge of animal appetite was

useful chiefly insofar as it suggested analogies to human functions.This focus on the complexities of the human drive to eat was appar-ent in the shifting lexicon physiologists drew on to characterize it: in

French, ‘besoin,’ ‘désir ,’ ‘ fonction naturelle,’ ‘ goût ,’ ‘ pente de l’âme,’

Fig. 2. ‘A sudden call, or one of the corporation summoned from his favorite amusement,’ Forbes, 1799, Courtesy National Library of Medicine.

25

Buffon (1749–1767), vol. 4, pp. 32–34, 43–48.26 Spink (1977), Vila (1998), pp. 30–38; Wilson (1931).








‘sensation,’ ‘sentiment ’ or ‘sentiment intérieur ,’ and, in English, ‘desire,’

‘natural inclination,’ ‘need,’ ‘sensation,’ and ‘sense.’ This unstableterminology arose in part from physiologists’ efforts to explain thedifference between feelings distinguished in common parlance as‘appetite’ and ‘hunger.’ This they ordinarily did by defining bothappetite and hunger as ‘sensations’ but then referring appetite to

pleasure and hunger to pain. Where Buffon had referred simply to

‘natural need,’ physiologists elaborated on hunger as a ‘need,’characterizing it as ‘pressing,’ as born of ‘abstinence’ and depriva-tion, as ‘voracious’ and indiscriminate. By contrast, physiologists

generally spoke of appetite in a language of pleasure. Allied to tasteand desire, appetite was satisfied only by appealing foods; it wasdelicate, soft, and easily disturbed; it was associated with gooddigestion and overall health.27

If, however, physiologists agreed in positioning appetite andhunger within the nexus of pleasure and pain, they often came intoconflict when seeking to explain the origin of these differing sensa-

tions and the implications of the pleasure-pain opposition. As withmany physiological investigations of this period, those focused onappetite and hunger differed depending on the authors’ relativeallegiance to the theoretical postures of mechanism and vitalism.

Although on some questions the stark contrasts that divided mech-anists and vitalists gave way as the eighteenth century progressed,divisions in respect to appetite and hunger and the larger study of ingestion and digestion remained strong. While mechanists sought

specific structures and identifiable stimuli to explain these phe-nomena, vitalists referred all phases of digestion—of which appe-tite and hunger were the first—to the work of an over-arching‘principle of life’ or to a specific ‘digestive’ or ‘assimilative’ force. 28

It is little wonder that mechanist and vitalist explanations of appetite and hunger radically diverged, as one of the most divisiveissues separating these camps overall had to do with the funda-mental nature of sensation and sensibility. Here the work of

Albrecht von Haller, the Swiss physiologist whose standing inphysiology equalled that of Buffon in natural history, was pivotal.Although on some questions Haller bridged the mechanist-vitalist

divide, he differed markedly from vitalists in holding that sensibil-ity, and the related but distinct property he identified as ‘irritabil-ity,’ were properties lodged in specific kinds of tissue—sensibilityin nervous tissue, irritability in muscle tissue—and he workedintensively to gauge the effects of specific stimuli and irritants on

these varieties of tissue.29 Vitalists, by contrast, saw these forcesas spontaneously inhering within living organisms and as function-ing independently of specific structures, nervous or otherwise. Vital-ists also held that living organisms act in accordance with the

dictates of vital forces or a unitary vital principle to accomplish endsnecessary to their health and preservation. Although they did notdiscount the role of stimuli, they did not believe stimuli were neces-

sary for vital action. Of even greater importance to efforts to under-stand appetite and hunger was the fact that vitalists conceptualized

‘internal sensations’ not as the effect of accumulated sense-impres-sions but as inherent urges that arose from deep within the organism

and drove it to the performance of functions essential to the mainte-nance of life.30 These differences meant, among other things, thatmechanists and vitalists were essentially at odds on whether ornot sensations of appetite and hunger required a describable appara-

tus or mechanism. Mechanists searched diligently for ‘organized’

structures to explain such phenomena, while vitalists held that sucha search missed what was most important about internal sensations,

their spontaneous functioning to preserve the general life and healthof the whole.

What, then, were some of the mechanisms physiologists pro-posed to explain appetite and hunger? An extended discussion of

hunger offered in the early nineteenth-century Dictionnaire de

médecine surveyed a variety of mechanist explanations rangingfrom ‘friction of the sides of the empty stomach that cause irrita-tion of the nervous filaments’ to ‘compression of the nervous

trunks of the stomach, especially the pneumo-gastric nerves’ to‘acrimony of the gastric juice that develops in the stomach duringa fast,’ and many others.31 Of these options the most influential inthe later eighteenth century were those proposed by Haller, first in

his physiology textbook of the late 1740s, and then, some decadeslater, by the Italian naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani.

In his inquiry into what drove ingestion, Haller focused not on

appetite but on hunger, which he termed a ‘sense of pain,’ an‘acute,’ ‘intolerable’ sensation, created by the ‘grating’ of irritatednerves and tissues one against another:

We are solicited to take food, as well from the sense of pain we

call hunger, as from that of pleasure, which is received by thetaste . . .The first of these proceeds doubtless from the sensible

folds or wrinkles of the stomach rubbing against each otherby the peristaltic motion, of which there is an acute sensation,

joined with a pressure from the diaphragm and abdominal mus-cles, by which the naked villi of the nerves on one side grate

against those of the other, after a manner intolerable. Thus weare effectually admonished of the dangers ensuing from toolong abstinence or fasting, and excited to procure food or nour-

ishment by labour and industry. To this sense perhaps the gas-tric liquor or juice of the stomach, collected and sharpened afterfeeding, does in some measure conduce, unless it becomesputrescent.32

Thus Haller held that hunger resulted from movements occasioned

in the stomach by muscular irritation and by nervous sensationsoperative in the stomach’s abundant network of nerves, althoughhe was unable to determine with any precision the relative impor-

tance of stomachal irritability and sensibility (Fig. 3). Similarly,although he attended less closely to appetite, he did in his brief re-marks propose a straightforward mechanical explanation for itsgenesis, suggesting that appetite resulted from muscular pressure

that caused saliva to pour into the mouth.33

Haller’s characterization of hunger as the result of stomachal

movements was to have a long life—it was still approvingly citedin the early twentieth century—but it left many unansweredquestions, including, as he himself indicated, the role of the ‘gastric

liquor’ in the progressive phases of digestion.34 It was this questionto which Lazzaro Spallanzani turned his attention in a series of dis-

sertations published in Modena in 1780 and translated into French in1783. Spallanzani rejected as untenable mechanist explanations

based on trituration as well as the eclectic view, attributed to ‘thegreat Boerhaave,’ which rested on a mix of trituration, the actionof stomachal heat, and chemical fermentation. His own investiga-tions were inspired by the work of Réaumur, whose approach he

replicated and extended by performing experiments on animals

27 Anon. (1751–1765), vol. 6, p. 373; Aumont (1751–1765), vol. 6, p. 376; Jaucourt (1751–1765), vol. 6, pp. 373–376 .28 Grimaud (1787), Grimaud (1789), Dumas (1800–1803), vol. 1, pp. 62–63, 331 .29 Steinke (2005), pp. 93–124.30 Bordeu (1818), Grimaud (1787), Grimaud (1789).31 Rullier (1821–1828).32 Haller (1966), vol. 2, pp. 81–82.33

Haller (1966), vol. 2, p. 62.34 Carlson (1916), pp. 17–18.








possessed of the three main types of stomachal structure—muscular,

membranous, and ‘mixed.’ Following Réaumur, he first had hisexperimental animals swallow metallic or wooden tubes filled withassorted foodstuffs, the tubal casings preventing, as in Réaumur’sexperiments, the kind of mechanical compression required by tritu-rationist theory.35 He then waited for varying spans of time while

the animals’ digestion proceeded before slaughtering the animals,

retrieving the vessels, and studying the remains left in the stomach.These experiments, all of which showed that the substances the ani-mals ingested were at least partially digested without the aid of

mechanical action, convinced Spallanzani that digestion was eithersolely or principally (depending on the stomachal structure) thework of the gastric juice.36

Spallanzani went far beyond Réaumur’s work of the 1750s by

extending all these findings to human digestion, which he studiedby undertaking often painful experiments on himself. Lauding ashis chief predecessor in this kind of self-experiment the Swiss

investigator Henri-Albert Gosse, Spallanzani repeated experimentsin which Gosse had collected his own gastric juice and tested itseffects on a variety of foodstuffs. Like Gosse, he also engagedrepeatedly in vomiting-at-will in order to test the time required

for the gastric juice to exert its effect on different types of foods,all this in spite of the troubles caused by the vagaries of his ownappetite.37 With these experiments Spallanzani encouraged achemically-based mechanism, one that was to gain more attention

as the ‘chemical revolution’ of the late eighteenth century lent chem-ical explanations in physiology a legitimacy they had not enjoyedsince the heyday of the old iatrochemistry and as objections to theintrusion of chemistry into physiology, lodged principally by vitalists

who insisted on an absolute distinction between vital and physico-chemical processes, began to lose force.38

In respect to the inquiries undertaken by Haller and Spallanzani,an essential point to emphasize is that in exploring the urge to eat

both men attended principally to hunger rather than to appetite.As would remain the case into the twentieth century, physiologistswho sought specific structures or incitatory processes to explain

the drive to eat focused on hunger as the sharper and more distinctof the two phenomena.39 Why it was easier to imagine mechanismsof pain rather than pleasure is a question of some interest, but here Ican only observe that this stance eventually led some physiologiststo designate hunger as the more readily distinguishable phenome-

non and to characterize appetite as the first ‘phase’ or ‘degree’ of hunger—a vague feeling that was experienced pleasurably but hardto pin down.40 Mechanist physiologists found appetite hard toexplain in part because it was associated with the pleasure derived

from specific foodstuffs, a problem they sought to transfer out of the realm of appetite into that of the physical apparatus of gustatorysensations. Haller led the way in this respect: characterizing the

difference between the painful and pleasurable sensations thatdrove ingestion, he emphasized not the distinction between hunger

and appetite but that between hunger and ‘taste,’ a maneuver thatallowed him to concentrate on the sensory structures of mouth

and tongue in seeking a definite physical source of the pleasurablesensations in question. Still, the origin of taste was not a problemthat mechanist physiology was well equipped to handle, as Hallerhimself admitted. In discussing varieties of taste sensations, Haller

recalled his initial inclination to tie the perception of different tastes

to the figures, shapes, and sizes of minute parts of foods ingested,and his eventual realization that such an approach was inadequate.After discussing the shape of various salts, Haller concluded thattastes are ‘too inconstant or changeable, to allow such a the-

ory . . .The mechanical reason, therefore, of the diversity of tastes,seems to reside in the intrinsic fabric or apposition of their elements,which do not fall under the scrutiny of our senses.’41

In regard to matters of taste mechanists were in much the same

quandary as that which they faced in attempting to explain glan-dular secretions. Mechanists had long attributed glandular actionto the compression of glandular bodies by surrounding muscle

and bone, but by 1750 it was widely recognized that this approach

did nothing to explain why particular glands secreted particularfluids. Indeed it was in regard to this problem that vitalists firstmade inroads against mechanists, denying the explanatory power

of such a model for glandular action and substituting for it a viewbased on the ‘internal sensations’ alluded to earlier, specifically the‘taste’ or ‘desire’ of the gland that determined which componentsof blood it drew to itself and acted upon in furtherance of its

Fig. 3. Illustrations of the liver and stomach, Jacques Gautier d’Agoty, Anatomie

générale des viscères en situation, Plate XV (1752), Courtesy National Library of

Medicine.

35 Spallanzani (1785), pp. 2, 270. There were six dissertations in all; the French translation was prepared by Jean Senebier; see Grondona (1973).36 Spallanzani (1785), pp. 64–247.37 Spallanzani (1785), pp. 248–265.38 On the new mechanism based on chemistry rather than geometry, see Roger (1993, p. 761); on the struggle between chemists and physiologists in the first half of the

nineteenth century for authority over problems of animal digestion and nutrition, see Holmes (1974).39 Cannon (1953), p. 270.40 Laporte (1787–1830); Bayle (1816), pp. 7–8; Gallouin and Le magnen (1987), p. 111 .

41 Haller (1966), vol. 1, pp. 258–265. Later investigators were more optimistic; on subsequent efforts to identify the mechanisms of distinct tastes, see Jütte (2005), pp. 232–235;Korsmeyer (1999), pp. 68–102.








specific function.42 Building on this view of the body’s internal wis-

dom, vitalists developed a view of appetite and hunger, eating anddigestion that similarly emphasized not anatomical structures butthe work of the ‘peculiar sensibility,’ the specific ‘tastes,’ ‘odors,’and ‘savors’ of the organs and systems engaged, all of them guidedin their choices by the vital or ‘intelligent principle’ that acted to

conserve the life of the organism:

Hunger is a conscious sentiment of the need for food: I sayconscious sentiment in order to distinguish it from the naturalsentiment that regulates the nutritive acts of plants and of eachpart of the body without the one or the other having any way of

perceiving or recognizing these acts . . .The sentiment of hungeris immediately determined by the principle that animates thebody, which has knowledge of its needs and which applies thissentiment exclusively to substances capable of satisfying these

needs.43

Although, according to vitalists, specific structures of tongue,mouth, esophagus, and stomach had important roles to play in

the desiring, taking in, and digesting of food, these processesengaged the bodily economy as a whole and involved not only theobvious anatomical structures that drew the attention of mecha-nists but also the skin, the connective tissue, and, most importantly,

the unifying architectonics of sympathies and synergies that unitedthe organism.44

Given the gulf between mechanist and vitalist styles of explana-tion, questions surrounding appetite and hunger came to be tied todebates at the heart of late Enlightenment physiology. This linkageis again suggested by the unstable appetite-hunger lexicon, in this

instance the sometime characterization of appetite as ‘urge or‘desire’ and hunger as ‘need.’ The use of these freighted terms indi-cates the extent to which physiological debates were enmeshedwith moral ones: as a ‘need,’ hunger could not be judged or denied,

but as an ‘urge’ or a ‘desire,’ appetite raised questions that wereinescapably joined to issues of choice and the exercise of free will.As such, appetite-hunger discourse was linked to that of the ulti-

mate ‘ends’ of the human organism, its fashioning and purpose inthe larger scheme of the natural and moral universe. This mattercan be approached from many directions, but one that is especiallyrevealing concerns the positions investigators staked out on theconnection between appetite and ‘instinct.’ As observed earlier,

Buffon argued that the distinction between the ‘purely mechanical’actions of animals and the reasoned choices made by humanbeings defined the essential difference between the two and estab-lished the superiority of humans over animals. When physiologists

took up this kind of question, one that spoke not to the mecha-nisms or forces that drove eating but to its larger moral signifi-cance, appetite was no longer subordinated to hunger as its

mysterious partner but instead emerged, with all its vagaries anddangers, as central to any understanding of the urge to eat.

4. Appetite: instinctual or willed?

I mentioned earlier that Spallanzani had little to say aboutappetite, but he did make one remarkable observation about appe-

tite when discussing the function of the small stones many observ-ers had found in the digestive tract of farmyard fowl. Taking note of these observations, Spallanzani put the question: ‘But what is theuse of these little stones? If they do not function to aid in the

trituration of foodstuffs, do they then play no role in the work of digestion? [Or] are they not, as some believe, a cause of the aug-

mentation of appetite?’45 His response merits citing at length(Fig. 4):

As for the . . .[question of appetite], this would be immediatelyresolved if gallinaceous chicks had the same inclinations in tak-ing nourishment as these birds do when they are adult . . .[The

chicks] want everything, they swallow everything. . .

littlestones, fragments of brick, hardened plaster . . .They run greed-ily to eat these [things], whether they are famished or haveeaten well . . .If these birds in maturing exhibited these same

tastes, one would say that the stones that they have in theirstomach are less the result of their choices [of food] than of their stupidity, and that they resemble the stupid ostrich that,according to observations made by Vallisnieri and Buffon, indis-

criminately eats stones, ropes, glass, and metal, because it isvery stupid and has a very obtuse sense of taste. But as theygrow, these chicks develop the instinct that was sleeping intheir infancy, and they change in this regard, as in several

others, their mores and their character.46

Since Spallanzani’s investigations of digestion ultimately aimed toexplicate human physiology—as his extensive and painful self-

experimentation indicated—this passage on the instinctual basisof eating readily invited the question of whether human beings,as opposed to barnyard chicks, know naturally or instinctuallyhow and what to eat. And that question raised in turn the larger

one of whether the human organism functioned naturally to itsown benefit, or, if not, what was the source of its ‘errors’ or way-wardness. In medicine this question frequently took the form of adebate over the power of the ‘healing force of nature,’ and hence

it undergirded conflicts about the extent to which physicians shouldseek to manage health and disease. But the question of nature’sbeneficence or fallibility was fundamental not only in medicinebut in all the sciences that presumed to speak of bodily processes

that impinged on issues of human choice and action, something

that the physiology of this era unquestionably did. Thus when phys-iologists identified hunger as a ‘need,’ often a painful one, while sit-uating appetite somewhere in the realm of ‘desire,’ ‘urge,’

‘inclination,’ or ‘pleasure,’ they accorded hunger a basic legiti-macy—that which indicated the need of the organism to take inthe foodstuffs that would keep it alive—while characterizing appe-tite as a phenomenon of dubious standing. It is notable in this re-

gard that mentions of the word ‘pleasure’ in connection withappetite invariably evoked warnings about the dangers of excess.Even in the Encyclopédie, often taken as the primary medium of the eighteenth century’s propaganda on behalf of pleasure, refer-

ence to appetite brought censorious comment on this ‘penchantof the soul for an object it represents to itself as a good though onlytoo often it is [in fact] a great evil.’47 Buffon too, as observed earlier,

associated human appetite with excess and illness.Yet on this question there was, again, a mechanist-vitalist

divide: mechanists like Haller tended to focus on apparatuses thatenabled functions and when these functioned badly to blameimmediate mechanical causes (obstructions, distentions) and torefer the more fundamental cause of disorder and illness to willed

errors of regimen, bad choices made by the eater, often if notalways made in response to the siren call of pleasure. Thus Haller’schapter on the ‘internal sensations’ governing eating covered

42 Bordeu (1818), p.163; Williams (1994), pp. 33–36.43 Grimaud (1787), pp. 129, 185–190; quotation from ibid., pp. 98–100; Grimaud (1789), p.1 and n.5.44 Grimaud (1787), Grimaud (1789), Williams (2008).45 Spallanzani (1785), p. 30.46

Spallanzani (1785), pp. 30–33.47 Anon. (1751–1765), vol. 6, p. 373.








perception, imagination, memory, attention, judgment, and willand not the urges buried in the organismic depths to which

vitalists like Grimaud attended.48 In Haller’s scheme if an eatererred, he did so because he made poor judgments and bad choices.For vitalists, on the other hand, the beneficial role of ‘instinctual’choice was essential given their view of the organism as a unity.

While vitalists recognized that some phenomena were governed

by conscious choice and others directed by the internal wisdom of the body, they tended to underplay this distinction and to emphasizethat health must be guided by the dictates of the vital principle. This

was especially true in the realm of eating and digestion since it wasby means of digestion that the organism repaired constant losses of force and warded off the destruction that threatened living beings atall times. For vitalists, in short, eating was too important to be left to

the conscious choice of the eater; rather, health and vitality restedon the eater proceeding in response to the ‘inner sensations’ that dif-ferentiated among good foods and bad and that signaled the pres-

ence of appetite, hunger, or satiety.49 Hence the insistence of vitalists that people who ate naturally ate well. Grimaud stated amedical truism when he observed that digestion works better whenappetite is present, but he drew a conclusion only vitalists theorized

as a principle when he urged that even if foods were ‘contrary inthemselves’ they were of value to patients if consumed as objectsof desire. Repeatedly, moreover, Grimaud emphasized that ‘the peo-ple,’ close to nature and in many respects more like animals than the

educated and civilized folk of the city, knew automatically what andhow to eat.50 In this sense vitalists saw appetite as a generaldisposition to act that replicated the ‘appetites’ or ‘tastes’ of theinner organs, which ‘knew’ which substances to assimilate or reject

in keeping with vital ‘needs.’Where does this leave Spallanzani’s little chicks and stupid

ostrich? Spallanzani clearly accepted that there were instinctualappetites for foods, but he held that these had to be ‘developed’

as the animal matured. For a mechanist-minded investigator of Spallanzani’s sort healthy appetites were at least in part a matterof learning through sensory experience, not organismic givens of

the kind posited by Grimaud and other vitalist physiologists. Thesediffering views on appetite and instinct had wide-ranging implica-tions for human eaters and the physicians who treated them. Itmight be thought that in practice none of this made much differ-ence—whether an individual was guided on what to eat by instinc-

tual appetites or had to learn to make rational choices of food topreserve good health—all physicians recognized that ‘errors’ wouldbe made and proposed means to correct them. But in fact the prac-tical consequences of physiological theorizing of this sort were

profound. The vitalist dictum that ‘he digests best who eats whathe desires’ meant that there could be no absolutes in respect todiet: to be healthy, individuals should consume what their peculiar

appetite urged them to eat. By contrast, the work of Spallanzaniwas among the earliest to suggest that based on the material nat-

ure of foodstuffs and standard operations of digestion certain foodswere, for everyone, healthier and more ‘digestible’ than others.

Accordingly, he ranked foods from easily digestible, such as veal,to the ‘acidic and salty foods that are ill suited to digestion’.51

Spallanzani did not go very far with this line of investigation, buthis findings on the actions of gastric juice did a great deal to under-

mine respect for the individuality of the digestive process, from thefirst prompt of appetite to evacuation. How and why this strand of

eighteenth-century thinking about appetite began to gain force is acomplicated matter, but an important element of the story involves

the relative promise and prestige of the methods employed in the

assorted sciences of appetite. In the next section I argue that itwas by asserting a new methodological clarity that experimentalistsgained special influence in the investigation of all phenomena

related to digestion, whose operations had hitherto been regardedas among the most obscure and difficult confronting science.52

5. How to know appetite: Questions of method

In the later eighteenth century physicians who made claimsabout appetite did so largely on the basis of time-honored meth-ods. If they were philosophically inclined, they might rely on intro-

spection, asserting with Antoine Le Camus, author of the widelyread La médecine de l’esprit , that self-knowledge could illuminatehow we experience our peculiar pleasures and aversions for wine

and other substances.53 Physicians also gauged the limits of appetiteand hunger by culling strange tales from history, travel literature,and medical tradition itself with its panorama of bizarre, exotic, ormonstrous phenomena of the body. As noted earlier, such storiesoften involved people who starved themselves, first denying and

eventually destroying the appetite, especially women who gainednotoriety when they survived long periods without eating, but alsomen who denied appetite from some motive of ambition or honor.54

Fig. 4. Illustration of the ostrich, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire

naturelle, générale et particulière, Vol. 16 (Volume 1 of Histoire naturelle des

oiseaux), Plate XXIX (1770), Courtesy History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries.

48 Haller (1966), vol. 2, pp. 32–55.49 Rousseau adapted this principle to his polemical ends in Emile; see Jütte (2005, p. 173).50 Grimaud (1787), p. 118; Grimaud (1789), p. 36.51 Spallanzani (1785, p. lxxviii) (introduction by Senebier).52 Lorry (1757), p. xx; Hunter (1772), p. 447.53

Le Camus (1769), vol. 1, pp. 243–248; for a much later use of introspection as a guide to appetite, see Beaunis (1889).54 Williams (2003), pp. 278–279; Vandereycken and van Deth (1996), pp. 45–46, 104–108.




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Such were the cases of a friend of Philippe Pinel who studied mani-

acally, took to eating only vegetables, and eventually succumbed toinanition, and the English physician William Stark, who died, seem-ingly of scurvy, while testing the effects of restricted dietetic regi-mens.55 Similarly, physicians mined historical tales of shipwrecksand sieges for evidence about the length of time human beings could

live without eating and the persistence or loss of appetite in people

long deprived of food (a favored source was Josephus, who describeda mother devouring her child during the last Roman siege of Jerusa-lem.)56 Yet the method that gave medicine its special distinction was

bedside observation, which, so some physicians insisted, was theonly reliable way to know human health and disease. As observedearlier, assessments of appetite were a constant of the practi-tioner-patient relationship, and while it is true that little discussion

is to be found in illness narratives of just how to assess the state of apatient’s appetite, this seems to have been the case precisely becausephysicians had full confidence in their capacity to know a ‘good,’

‘bad,’ ‘failing,’ ‘weak,’ or ‘reviving’ appetite when they saw one. 57

While physicians employed methods long honored in their field,naturalists approached appetite both by broad philosophical con-

jecture and by gathering specifics on the eating habits of different

animals. Buffon was the acknowledged master among naturalistsgiven his unparalleled knowledge of the diets of animals localand exotic and his expansive speculations about the role of nour-ishment in the emergence of new varieties of animal life over

time.58 Although all students of appetite consulted natural history,the extent to which such findings about animal eating could beapplied to human beings remained a matter of contention, withvitalists such as Grimaud generally hostile to the idea of extrapolat-

ing from knowledge of animals to human beings. The vitalist concep-tion of organismic unity—the interrelation of physical and ‘moral’factors including habit, occupation, temperament, and the all-impor-tant ‘passions’—meant that human life and health had a specific

character not shared with animals. Such criticisms notwithstanding,the study of animal diet, eating habits, the structure and work of teeth, mouth, gullet, and all parts of the alimentary tract steadily

gained importance through these years and its value was widely rec-ognized even if, as Spallanzani himself implied in taking up self-experiment, such comparisons carried only the weight of ‘analogy’and could not take the place of direct investigations of humanphenomena.59

Yet the decisive way in which animals came to figure in theinvestigation of appetite was not in the peaceful observation of the naturalist but in aggressive experiments devised by physiolo-gists. By 1800, a number of investigators had begun studying

appetite and hunger by subjecting animals to starvation or feedingthem particular foods in isolation to gauge the effects of distinctdiets. Even the vitalist Charles-Louis Dumas, author of a four-

volume physiology textbook published in 1800–1803, moved tosupplement vitalists’ traditional reliance on bedside observation

with experiments on dogs that were intended to gauge the extentto which hunger could be mitigated by the simultaneous adminis-

tration of opium and other substances known to damp down appe-tite.60 Dumas was careful to conclude his discussion by urging thathis experimental results were in full conformity with the findingsof clinical medicine, but the fact that he, as a vitalist standard-bearer,

took up such methods indicated that animal experimentation wasincreasingly thought to be of peculiar value to investigations of

appetite and hunger. Soon after Dumas’s findings were published,the figure who was to do as much as anyone to make physiologyan experimental science, François Magendie, carried out a series of experiments to determine whether dogs could survive on ‘non-

nitrogenous’ foodstuffs. Reporting results later lauded as the first

to demonstrate the need for protein, Magendie concluded that lifecould not be sustained in his subjects by sugar, olive oil, or butter ea-ten in isolation.61

Magendie’s insistence that his findings on dogs were directlyapplicable to human dietetics—he claimed to have proved thatavoiding foodstuffs containing excessive nitrogen could preventthe formation of stones—marked an irreversible transition in phys-

iology. And even though Magendie himself did not see much prom-ise on these questions from vivisection, others among hiscontemporaries believed that it was precisely vivisection that

would determine the role of nerves in appetite, hunger, and diges-tion. Their favored procedure was vagotomy, sectioning of the va-gus nerve, to see if animals still showed a desire to eat and stillcould digest foodstuffs once this pathway from viscera to brain

was cut.62 It might seem that in such experiments the old effort todistinguish between appetite and hunger by referring the formerto pleasure and the latter to pain had little place—how, after all,could it be known whether an animal reviving from surgery ate from

pleasurable appetite or from painful hunger? But investigators whocut the vagus nerves in dogs, horses, and rabbits did use the term‘appetite’ to describe the animals’ readiness to eat in the aftermathof the operation: one horse was said to have ‘eaten with appetite

around six liters of oats’.63 Still, vagotomies chiefly aimed to expli-cate neither appetite nor hunger but the work of nerves in digestion.Certainly researchers wanted to see if animals still showed interestin eating after the vagus nerve was cut. But once they established

that the animals would eat, they quickly slaughtered the animalsand performed postmortems in order to collect remains from thedigestive tract and to determine how rapidly and with what results

digestion took place. In using a method they believed would, at last,yield definitive conclusions about the obscure process of digestioninvestigators pushed to the margin any interest in whether their sac-rificed animals had eaten from appetite or hunger, pleasure or pain.

6. Conclusion

At the outset I urged that it was in the later eighteenth centurythat the drive got underway in nutritional science to establish uni-versal standards of healthy eating to the neglect of individual pref-erences and pleasures. How and why this position took hold has no

simple explanation, but some suggestions may be made based onwhat happened to thinking about appetite after 1800 in the threedomains surveyed here. A full exposition is impossible in this

space, but in some respects the position that appetite was to occu-py into our own time was already clear by the early nineteenthcentury.

Perhaps the most fully elaborated conception of appetite in theeighteenth century was that offered by Buffon, who made powerful

use of appetite as a marker of animal nature in contradistinction to

55 Pinel (1798), p. 219; Pinel (1809), pp. 485–486; Stark (1788).56 Jaucourt (1751–1765), vol. 6, p. 374; Leroux (1804), pp. 25–26.57 Barthez, Bouvart, Fouquet, Lorry, and Lamure (1807), pp. 106, 154, 174; Passmore (1993) .58 Spary (2000), pp. 104–111.59 Spallanzani (1785), pp. lviii-lix.60 Dumas (1800–1803), vol. 4, pp. 59–66.61 Magendie (1816), Olmsted (1944), pp. 67–69.62

Skandalakis and Skandalakis (1986), Neuburger (1981), pp. 223–227; Brodie (1814); Leuret and Lassaigne (1825), pp. 127–128.63 Leuret and Lassaigne (1825), p. 134.








human capacities of intellection and reasoned choice. And beyondthis philosophical framework for thinking about appetite, Buffon

offered detailed investigations of the eating habits of many differ-ent species of animals as well as varieties within the human spe-cies. It would be hard to overestimate the impact of Buffon’swork in all byways of biology.64 But, as was to happen in all the

investigative domains that encompassed appetite in the eighteenth

century, natural history itself gradually split, after the turn of thecentury, into independent disciplines based on specialized methodsthat eschewed the puzzle of appetite in favor of more tractable prob-

lems. Comparative anatomists sought to extend knowledge of thestructures of eating and digestion. Field naturalists gathered newfindings on diet and eating habits among species previously littleknown. Perhaps the most telling shift came in early formulations

of what became the dominant problem of nineteenth-century lifescience, the fixity or malleability of species. Burkhardt has arguedin respect to Lamarck that although the progenitor of French

transformism is often said to have accorded the ‘wishing or willing ’of animals a large role in evolutionary change, he in fact rejectedappetites and desires as excessively voluntarist in favor of ‘needs’and ‘habits’ associated with identifiable physical structures.65 Of

similarly great moment in the history of appetite was the sediment-ing out from Enlightenment natural history of a human-centeredscience—sometimes designated the ‘natural history of man,’ some-times the ‘science of man’ or ‘ethnology’ or ‘anthropology’—that took

all human phenomena, physical and moral, as its special province.This new anthropological science was from its inception divided,in a fashion that was never to be overcome, between investigatorswho studied human beings as physical creatures living alongside

animals in nature and those who approached human nature and ac-tions as moral and social (in time ‘cultural’) problems. In many waysappetite stood, amid this bifurcation, as an exemplary problem. Itpartook of the physical and as such belonged to life science, but it

was also, evidently, a part of moral and social life and as such re-quired distinct modes of investigation. A figure who in his own expe-rience exemplified this division was W. F. Edwards, who as an aide in

Magendie’s laboratory performed experiments to determine the ef-fect of ‘physical agents’ (heat, light, air) on human development,but who was also instrumental in founding the new Société ethno-logique, a body that initially proclaimed its intention to study humanlife from all perspectives but that in fact devoted its efforts chiefly to

studying the customs and habits of peoples round the globe. Thuswhile Edwards, in his De l’influence des agens physiques sur la vie

(1824), touched on eating and digestion in an effort to gauge theireffects on transpiration, the ethnological society he guided, in its

instructions to voyagers, urged observations of agriculture and theavailability of particular foodstuffs.66

Appetite was caught up in a similar process of bifurcation with-

in medicine after 1800. Despite its ubiquity as a marker of health orsickness, appetite was not susceptible to investigation by the

methods that came to represent medical progress after 1800, espe-cially pathological anatomy. Once pathological anatomy became

the favored procedure of the Paris Clinical School, the study of appetite could proceed only in one of two distinct directions. Eitherappetite was directly linked to the operations of visceral organs ortissues that, when diseased, left visible lesions, in which case it was

the organs and tissues that were of prime importance, not appetite.

Or appetite was some puzzling mix of somatic and psychic, aphenomenon that had no visible marker and that could be known,

if at all, only through methods unconnected to the dissectingchamber. In this case bedside observation remained perforce themethod of choice, the only way physicians had of confrontinghuman experience whole. Certainly this era was witness to efforts

to refine the methods of listening and reporting on which bedside

observation of phenomena such as appetite depended. This wasespecially true within emergent ‘mental medicine,’ which sawthe development of new styles of patient-physician dialogue and

vastly richer case-studies than those of the eighteenth century.67

In the France of Revolution and Empire inspiration for such stepscame chiefly from Philippe Pinel, whose vitalist grounding encour-aged him to seek access to patients’ ‘internal sensations’ as one

source of their afflictions and to chart the simultaneously psychicand somatic manifestations of appetite disorders.68 Yet in time‘mental’ medicine rejected the physical-moral framework Pinel had

favored and came to focus on strictly mental phenomena such asdelusions and hallucinations while evincing little interest in feelingsand states linked to the lowly operations of ingestion and digestion.In this respect mental medicine of the early nineteenth century

resembled the philosophical tradition that, as Carolyn Korsmeyerhas shown, regarded matters of taste—the taste of food—asunworthy of attention.69

Finally, in physiology as well, appetite as a blended physical-

moral phenomenon fell victim to progress. In the late eighteenthcentury vitalist thinking had come to be widely regarded as a clearadvance over mechanism precisely because it approached physi-cal-moral phenomena such as appetite from the perspective of

organismic unity. Even Haller acknowledged that in operations of sensibility, especially the sensations associated with the work of stomach and intestines, predictable reactions such as those seenin genuinely mechanical operations could not be discerned.70 In

this respect Haller did not stand too far from the conclusion of thevitalist Grimaud, who declared flatly that matters of appetite anddigestion were insoluble mysteries.71 And yet the late eighteenth

century did see triumphs by mechanist-minded investigators, if not into the nature of the urges driving ingestion certainly, withthe work of Spallanzani, into aspects of digestion that were equallysignificant. It is unsurprising, then, that faced with an enigmatic phe-nomenon like appetite physiologists increasingly opted to study

those components of digestion that seemed amenable to focusedexperimentation on limited problems such as those Magendie tookup in studying the nutritive powers of non-nitrogenous foods. Thuswhile vitalists continued to argue that human health and disease

could be understood only in their uniqueness, and only with thetools of an expansive physiology that took full account of physical-moral relations, Magendie and others insisted on an experimen-

tally-oriented physiology that accepted as problems only ones itcould hope to solve.72 Thus it was that a procedure like vagotomy,

which purported to say something about digestion in all itsphases—beginning with the prompt of appetite—became instead a

method that took not the desire to eat but the physical remains of digestion as its principal focus. Similarly, Magendie’s starvationexperiments claimed to say something about appetite but in fact saidonly that dogs fed certain foods in isolation would die. What the dog

desired to eat—or whether dogs, like humans, had desires—were

64 Gayon (1992), pp. 631–688.65 Burkhardt (1984, pp. xxx-xxxii): ‘What counted for Lamarck in the way animals responded to their environments was not the desires of the animals but rather their habits’.66 Edwards (1824), pp. 316–317; Mémoires de la Société ethnologique (1841), vol. 1, pp. vii-xiv.67 Goldstein (1987), 79–89.68 Williams (2010).69 Williams (2007), Korsmeyer (1999), pp. 1–10.70 Steinke (2005), pp. 105–107.71

Grimaud (1787), pp. 161–163.72 Lesch (1984).








matters unapproachable in his laboratory. In this fashion experimen-

tal physiology came to take as its object phenomena reducible to dis-cernible, ideally quantifiable, reactions in living subjects: ingestionand digestion that proceeded after the cutting of specific nerves, fail-ing and death from inanition in animals deprived of adequate food.Appetite was, for the moment at least, not among these. It would

be a full century before physiologists, joined in the late nineteenth

century by physiological psychologists, would devise experimentalmethods to gauge appetite. By the time they did so the convictionwas firmly entrenched that ingestion and digestion were material

processes, explicable in material terms and subject to general lawsof physico-chemical science in which human desires had little place.Little wonder that when appetite did enter the laboratory it did sonot as a dimension of human eating, with all its psychosomatic

obscurities, but of the white rat, whose eating has been taken eversince to illuminate our own.

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Appetite in the Enlightenment,