Emma C. Spary

Assimilating knowledge - food and nutrition in early modern physiologies.

In 1783, the results of a twenty-year series of digestive experiments by the Swiss pharmacist Henri-Albert Gosse (1754-1816) were published, in intimate and extraordinary detail, in a book on the mechanism of digestion by the Italian Jesuit naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani. Gosse’s autoexperimentation relied on a unique corporeal technique mastered early in life—his ability to vomit at will by swallowing large quantities of air. Gosse used this skill to investigate the chemistry and mechanics of digestion, and also to investigate the digestibility of different foods. The results of such experiments were of general interest to experimenters on the body in the eighteenth century, many of whom concerned themselves with the question of how food was converted into new blood. Ever since William Harvey’s theory of blood circulation had undermined the older Galenic physiological model and its rationale for dietetic regimen in the first half of the seventeenth century, investigations into the anatomy and physiology of the digestive system had been on the agenda of philosophers, physiologists and physicians who proclaimed their allegiance to the Moderns. Widely-used descriptions of bodily function in terms of corporeal balance and humoral flows, along with explanations for the generation and regeneration of living beings, now needed to be completely reconfigured. In medical debates over eating habits, digestibility was a key attribute of diet in the early modern period, in ways which modern historians often overlook. Whatever one’s particular model of the digestive process, it was widely presumed that any food which could not be overcome, reduced and absorbed into the body by the digestion posed a considerable threat to both corporeal and moral health. Physicians routinely recommended the avoidance of