- Meat, Medicine and Human Health in the Twentieth Century edited by David Cantor, Christian Bonah, and Matthias Dörries
meat, nutrition, regulation.
The body of scholarship on food and diet in the historiography of modern medicine and public health is surprisingly small, especially considering the importance assigned to dietetics by health authorities and the centrality of nutrition in recent public health campaigns. Meat, Medicine and Human Health, which emerged from a workshop held at the National Library of Medicine in 2006, is an excellent contribution to this literature. Providing a cross-sectional view of a large and complex topic, the book “explores the meanings and uses of claims about the health consequences of meat” in the long twentieth century (6). With a focus on four main actors—the meat [End Page 699] industry, consumers, medical professionals, and the state—the volume’s ten essays address the role of meat in medical therapeutics, public health, and health policy in Europe and North America.
The first three essays examine some of the therapeutic and investigational uses of meat. Ilana Löwy explores the history of zomotherapy, the consumption of raw meat juice to treat tuberculosis in the early twentieth century. The French physician and physiologist Charles Richet, who developed it, observed that zomotherapy did not eliminate the tubercle bacillus, but it restored “the patients’ strength and their work capacity.” Richet acknowledged that the results were likely an “‘economic cure’ rather than a medical one,” but he suggested: “Perhaps one should define this capacity as a true cure?” (37). Löwy’s essay neatly introduces many of themes central to the work as a whole: the blurry boundary between food and drug, the socioeconomic dimensions of health and nutrition, the contested role of foods as therapies or preventive substances, and the commercialization of nutrition.
Continuing the discussion of meat in therapeutics, Susan Lederer’s essay shows how liver, once considered by many Americans a food fit only for animals, became the primary treatment for pernicious anemia by the 1930s. The challenge faced by physicians was not demonstrating the efficacy of the “liver life-belt”; it was convincing patients to regard offal as a food and to make it palatable enough for regular consumption. Turning to the use of meat in the medical laboratory, Naomi Pfeffer argues that the mass-production of “biotrash” by industrial slaughterhouses was critical for the development of endocrinology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, meat-packers and medical researchers developed complex and evolving economic relationships for mutual profit.
The five subsequent essays explore the social, cultural, and political dimensions of meat and health, with the first two focusing on the health dimensions of the meat-packing industry. Donald Stull and Michael Broadway illuminate the occupational and community health consequences that have attended the deskilling and deurbanization of meat processing in the United States and Canada, where most of the jobs are performed by poor, recently arrived immigrants willing to trade their health—physical, mental, and emotional—for slightly higher wages than they could earn elsewhere. Jeffrey Pilcher shows that American meat-packers failed in their attempts to establish industrialized processing and refrigerated meat in Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This resulted in large part from cultural differences, as most Mexicans regarded only recently butchered meat as healthful.
The other three essays examine how messages of the healthfulness (or unhealthfulness) of meat were constructed or appropriated by various [End Page 700] groups. David Cantor explores the contested role of meat as a cause of cancer in the early twentieth century, focusing in particular on the American Society for the Control of Cancer’s (ASCC) public education campaigns. In contrast to the prevailing trend, the ASCC made little mention of meat in their outreach, fearing that a dietary explanation might undercut the message that early detection and treatment were critical. Rima Apple examines how and why meat became such a central element of the American diet, focusing...