ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

‘Something may be said in favour of those whom Disease hath brought to a Dog-like appetite’: Medicalising excessive appetites in the seventeenth century

• In Event: The Science and Medicine of Habits III: Habits, the Body and Disorder

English Abstract

Historians have long recognised that appetite was profoundly problematic for early modern concepts of health and the body. However, little notice has been paid to the distinct and recognisable excessive appetite disorders to which medical writers dedicated much of their attention. As a 1684 medical dictionary defined these disorders, ‘bulimia’ was ‘an extraordinary Appetite, often accompanied with a defection of Spirits’ while ‘canina appetentia’ was ‘an Extreme hunger joyned with Vomiting, or a Looseness’.

This paper will trace the changing medical picture of ‘bulimia’ and ‘canine appetite’ across the seventeenth century. By tracking shifts in terminology, symptomatology, and aetiology, it will suggest that excessive appetites underwent a process of medicalisation in this period. Bulimia and canine appetite, both of which had classical roots, were the subject of increasing medical scrutiny, reassessed in response to or used as testing grounds for emerging theories of the body derived from developments in anatomy and iatrochemistry. Attempts to refine and stabilise this medical picture contributed to the proliferation of an increasingly precise specialist terminology which spread far beyond the medical sphere.

This paper will show how commentators reflected on issues of control, agency, and moderation, in particular the relationship between appetite disorders and gluttony. The bulimia or canine appetite sufferer was distinguished from the habitual glutton because he did not exercise his will in disordering his appetite. Nonetheless, his total collapse of self-control threatened the ideal of moderation, that ‘note of distinction betwixt man and beast’, encouraging the condemnation of sufferers and a critique of immoderate behaviour more generally. This paper will ultimately suggest that these pathological conditions enabled medical and moral commentators to reflect on both the workings of the appetite and the appetitive norms of early modern society.

Author

• Helena Constance Aeberli, University of Oxford