Bellies, Bowels and Entrails in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, and Sophie Vasset (review)

As a number of scholars have suggested, the role of the digestive system in eighteenth century medicine and culture has not had the attention it deserves. The nerves, so much sexier, have rather hogged the limelight, even though an examination of medical literature shows that the guts in many ways retained their traditional centrality. For many physicians, a focus on the stimulation of the nerves was easily incorporated into a models based on the bowels. Spary's Eating the Enlightenment, Guerrini's Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment, Miller's A Modern History of the Stomach, and the chapters by Jonsson, Vila, Rousseau, and Dacome in Forth and Carden-Coyne's excellent Cultures of the Abdomen have started to give the digestion some of the attention it deserves. Rebecca Anne Barr, Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, and Sophie Vasset's Bellies, Bowels and Entrails in the Eighteenth Century is thus a well-timed contribution to this topic, bringing together French- and English-speaking historians and literary scholars to examine medical thinking on the guts and their metaphorical and symbolic significance as the dark side of le siècle des Lumières.

After an introduction by the editors setting out the themes of the book, chapter 1, Gilles Thomas's "The Belly and the Viscera of the Capital City," looks at the metaphorical bowels of Paris, notably in relation to Les Innocents cemetery, a topic familiar to readers of Aries's In the Hour of our Death and Andrew Miller's 2011 novel Pure. The second chapter, Sabine Barles and Andre Guillerne's "The Intestinal Labours of Paris," considers the putrefying matter of the city and its role in the city's life and economy. As such, neither has much to say about actual bowels, but the third chapter, "Digesting in the Long Eighteenth Century," by Ian Miller, goes some way to correct this, giving a brief but useful summary of medical thinking on digestion, including iatromechanical, vitalist, and iatrochemical views and the crucial nerve/stomach nexus. While there is perhaps little that is really new here, this lucid chapter would make an excellent introduction for teaching.

Chapter 4, Micheline Louis-Courvoisier's "The Soul in the Entrails," looks at what epistolary consultations reveal about patients' attitudes toward stomach complaints and their relation to emotional and mental symptoms. It correctly notes the common assumption of a direct link between emotions, the mind, and constipations and trapped wind, but does not address some important historiography or the key question of how that relates to Enlightenment thinking of the mind/body problem. The fifth chapter, Mark Jenner's "Sawney's Seat: The Social Imaginary of the London Bog-house," is a droll and informative examination of privies. It mounts something of an apology for the developing hygienic ideas and habits of the elite, and discusses the scatological abuse of Scotsmen in London. Chapter 6, "Eighteenth-Century Paper," by Amelie Junqua, is a study of the material culture of paper and the literary theme of "bumfodder," but is only tangentially related to the bowels. Jennifer Ruimi's "'Words Have No Smell': Faecal References in Eighteenth-Century théâtre de société" examines the prominence of "erotico-scatological" themes in that French genre and their political edge.

Chapter 8, Anthony Mahler's "The Legibility of the Bowels," looks at the themes of enemas and so forth in the German writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche. Chapter 9, "Parodies of Pompous Knowledge," makes it clear that Guilhem Armand, a specialist in eighteenth-century literature and science, is also an expert on the apparently copious history of Enlightenment-era farting. His illuminating chapter shows the continuing pungency of Rabelaisian fart rhetoric and metaphors, as the reverse side of the neoclassical sensibility. Clemence Aznavour provides chapter...