ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Making of “Diseases of Culture”: Diet, diagnosis, and modernity in early twentieth century Denmark

• In Event: Shifting Perspectives on Disease Entities

English Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, competing models of diet and disease were reshaping European understandings of the body. Emerging nutrition science promoted a standardized, quantitative biopolitics of eating, while off-modern Lebensreformmovements promoted holistic and naturopathic alternatives. This paper examines how the Danish physician Mikkel Hindhede (1862-1945) contributed to the negotiation between these epistemic cultures.

For 30 years, he served as founding director of Denmark’s national nutrition research laboratory. There, he published more than 40 studies on everything from the digestibility of potatoes to “Chinese ways of living”, with methods ranging from metabolic self-experimentation to statistical comparisons of diets across cultures. In his research, he developed the argument that certain toxins – from coffee, tobacco, alcohol and meat - had led to the rise of “diseases of culture” such as arthritis, apoplexy and gastrointestinal cancer. These disease entities were presented as hybrid medical–social categories: they connoted both physiological dysfunction and the perceived ills of industrial society.
Drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality (Alaimo 2010), this paper examines how Hindhede redefined disease by following the circulation of nutrients, toxins, and waste across bodies and environments. By reinterpreting diagnoses through these material flows, his diagnostic claims doubled as critiques of modernity and its dietary regimes. Ultimately, Hindhede’s work provides a case for integrating environmental and medical historical approaches to show how food contributes to the continual remaking of disease entities across bodies, communities, and environments.

Author

• Andreas Schmidt Eriksen, University of Copenhagen