Author:
Williams, Elizabeth A. (Elizabeth Ann), 1950- author.
ImprintChicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Description433 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Note:Part one. Anxieties of appetite : Created needs in the Enlightenment, 1750-1800 --Why we eat: the ancient legacy -- "False or defective" appetite in the medical enlightenment -- Human and animal appetite in natural history and physiology -- Part two. The elusiveness of appetite : laboratory and clinic, 1800-1850 -- Perils and pleasures of apettite at 1800: Xavier Bichat and Erasmus Darwin -- The physiology of appetite to 1850 -- Extremes and perplexities of appetite in clinical medicine -- Part three. Intelligent or "blind and unconscious"? Appetite, 1850-1900 -- The drive to eat in nutritional physiology -- The psychology of ingestion: appetite in physiological and animal psychology -- Peripheral or central? Disordered eating in clinical medicine -- Part four. Appetite as a scientific object, 1900-1950 -- Psyche, nerves, and hormones in the physiology of ingestion -- Appetite and the nature-nurture divide: eating behavior in psychology and ethology -- Somatic, psychic, psychosomatic: the medicine of troubled appetite -- Epilogue: appetite after 1950.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references (pages 369-411) and index.
Note:"Historians have begun to explore why and how eating has become problematic for more and more people. But so far little attention has been given to the problem of appetite -- the changing ways that the appetite for food is formed or how the views of scientific and medical experts on the subject have developed over time. In this book, Elizabeth Williams traces the history of academic inquiry into appetite's nature and functioning in the two centuries between 1750 and 1950, from the mid-Enlightenment to the dawn of big science. She reveals how appetite and eating came to be an object of scientific study by turning to advances in physiology, natural history, medicine, and, from the late nineteenth century, psychology and ethology. The author's goals are capacious, however, for she aims not only to convey the development of the science but, in so doing, to root out the cause of our modern nutritional disarray"-- Provided by publisher.
