Williams, Elizabeth A. (Author)
University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 2020
Language: English
Physical Details: 416
Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents, Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science. Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself..
...MoreReview Ian Miller (2022) Review of "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950". American Historical Review (pp. 1568-1569).
Review Alice Weinreb (2022) Review of "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (pp. 137-138).
Review Emma Spary (2022) Review of "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950". Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology (pp. 971-974).
Review Stephen E. Mawdsley (2022) Review of "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 252-253).
Review Stephen E. Mawdsley (2022) Review of "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 252-253).
Review Nadja Durbach (2022) Review of "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 192-193).
Review David F. Smith (2021) Review of "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950". British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 128-129).
Multimedia Object Claire Clark; Williams, Elizabeth A. (2020) Elizabeth A. Williams, “Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950” (U Chicago Press, 2020).
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