Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950

• Published in: Early American Literature 2023-01, Vol.58 (1), p.276-315
• Main Author: Weisse, Travis A
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Animal behavior; Appetite; Behavioral psychology; Book publishing; Conditioning; Cultural change; Food; Hunger; Laboratories; Medicine; Ontology; Physiology; Psychology; Science; Scientists; Stomach
• ISSN: 0012-8163; 1534-147X
• DOI: 10.1353/eal.2023.0023

[...]in part 4, the hard question of appetite's ontology is set aside in favor of observable, quantifiable feeding behaviors that could be manipulated by products of the laboratory. [...]of their home discipline, Williams's scientists (themselves often fighting across unbridgeable philosophical gaps: mechanism and vitalism, experimentalism and bedside therapeutics, somaticism and behaviorism) largely shied away from the word appetite in their investigations, preferring to study nearby concepts described as psychic excitation, instincts, ingestive activity, or gastric neuroses. Because scientists across centuries and different disciplines including "physiology, natural history . . . psychology and ethology" could not agree on a common physical or mental understanding of the appetitive impulse, many investigators answered proxy questions instead, nipping away at the edges of the problem by examining neighboring concerns about the intricacies of digestive physiology or by exploring links between hunger and the nervous system, hormones, or patterns in animal behavior (4). Some physiologists, such as Claude Bernard and Curt Richter, imagined a complex cascade of internal homeostatic changes to the body's blood chemistry brought about by digestion that triggered specific instinctual cravings-and the physical "pain" of hunger itself-that would help the animal automatically satisfy its nutritional demands (224). Through operant conditioning, they showed that cues merely promising (but not providing) food could automatically stimulate the animal's salivary glands. [...]food instincts were not naturally or permanently embedded in the animal's psyche; its choices evolved along with its changing environment, with culture, with complex circumstances, and with systems of reward and punishment.