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

“The eighteenth-century history of bellies, bowels and entrails is not for delicate stomachs” (101). This pronouncement by Mark Jenner in chapter 3 of Rebecca Anne Barr, Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, and Sophie Vasset’s edited collection resonates with anyone familiar with the eighteenth-century fixation on bodily functions, materiality, and scatology. It also serves as a warning for those who are for the first time wading into the subject. This book of considerable scope and imagination is a collaborative effort to bring to life in a vividly visceral way the spaces, bodies, and enthusiasms of eighteenth-century life. As such, it is an important contribution to scholarship at the intersection of medical history and culture, and a corrective to simplifying assumptions regarding “ways in which the polite and impolite were woven together” (6) in the paradoxical discourse of what the editors so accurately characterize as the “murky eighteenth century” (6).

In their introduction, Barr, Kleiman-Lafon, and Vasset carefully lay out the book’s argument regarding the continued prevalence of interest in the bowels and viscera in a time of Enlightenment typically associated with the brain and rationalism. The treatment of the medical history of the stomach covers a good deal of terrain, touching on the experiments, treatises, and disputes that attest to physicians’ deep and abiding interest in visceral matters. Ian Miller’s chapter in the first section further extends and anchors the discussion of the eighteenth-century medical context, while complicating assumptions that approaches to digestion were wholly materialist. As Miller points out, in the literature and popular culture of the day, the stomach was as much a seat of emotion as of digestion.

The four-part organizational structure accommodates a range of approaches from a diverse number of disciplines, including medicine, literature, scientific writing, urban history, and cultural history in England, France, and Germany. In their unrelentingly detailed evocations of eighteenth-century urban space, opening chapters by Gilles Thomas, Sabine Barles, and Andre Guillerme establish a crucial foundation for subsequent readings and a counterpoint to the rural perspective that comes later in the volume with Jacques Gélis’s essay on “The Saints of the Entrails and the Bowels of the Earth” highlighting the continued importance of natural processes to agrarian societies. Taken together, these essays complicate standard identifications of filth with abjection to highlight how waste might also be viewed as a signifier of prosperity. In this sense, the book tries to move beyond ways in which scholarship has typically looked to bodily disorder as a symptom of a culture given over to consumption and luxury.

Mark Jenner’s detailed work on the London bog-house provides a more focalized perspective on the social spaces of waste management, while Amélie Junqua offers a complementary take on “relics of the bum” in her essay on waste paper. Here, and throughout the volume, the discussion moves beyond the commonplaces and touchstones of eighteenth-century British culture that have for so long been anchored in Jonathan Swift’s writing and John Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe” (1682) to open up a less Anglocentric window into the period. This is one of the chief strengths of the collection in that it sidesteps canonical material to delve into understudied texts and subjects, as in, for example, Anthony Mahler’s work on Lichtenberg’s Hogarth commentaries in chapter 8. Although one cannot help but feel a sense of regret that more familiar bellies, such as the one Henry Fielding unforgettably places at the centre of Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), are absent from this commentary, this book is a valuable contribution to knowledge, especially for scholars less acquainted with the French and German medical scene.

At the same time, this collection integrates approaches familiar to the health humanities in acknowledging the diverse number of genres and cultural forms in which the medicalized body...