There is something about all this enteric disorder that seems peculiarly contemporary. Bookstore shelves are packed with subtitles like “An Empowering Guide to Your Gut and Its Microbes,” and many of my friends spend hours perched on the toilet in a state of disarray. As Natasha Boyd ruminates in a wonderful essay in the Drift, “Americans of all stripes seem to be experiencing a crisis of digestion” — a crisis that seems obscurely related to our intensifying angst.
Richardson makes a number of fascinating forays into corners of history that I had never thought to wonder about: She writes about the institutionalization of lunchtime (a practice that arose during the Industrial Revolution, when advocates for workers’ rights insisted that laborers needed a midday break); the disposal of human waste before the invention of indoor plumbing (achieved, at least in many major cities, by “night soil men” who carried the city’s excretions off to the countryside, where they were repurposed as fertilizer); and the dramatic sanitary reform of a highly unhygienic London (prompted by a particularly smelly period during the summer of 1858 known, vividly, as “The Great Stink”).
In addition to its many charms as a source of information, “Rumbles” is a compelling compendium of ideas. Its discussion of gut disease as an emblem of modernity leaves readers with much to digest. (...)
The gut’s mystique is, in part, a product of its inaccessibility. For centuries, it was maddeningly opaque to medical science: “Obscured by the liver, nestled by the gallbladder, spleen, pancreas and large intestine, it hides from prying eyes and pressing fingers,” Richardson writes. Worse, “the organ really only makes sense when it is in motion” and is therefore difficult to observe.
But if the stomach was long considered “the most enigmatic of organs” by doctors, it was always acutely palpable to nonprofessionals. Unlike the silent thyroid or the quiet kidneys, the gut is “notoriously outspoken,” as Richardson winningly writes. It grumbles and grouses when it is empty and whines when it is overfull. In medieval Europe, practitioners of the art of “gastromancy” exploited its loquacity, attempting to “channel the voices of the dead through the stomach and foretell the future by interpreting its sounds.” But we need not appeal to specialists or gastromancers to understand the gut’s complaints: As Richardson points out, we are in “near constant conversation” with our stomachs. “Choosing what to eat is an everyday intervention into health” that we can scarcely avoid, for which reason the gut has often served as a “site of persistent lay experimentation.” We are all the world’s foremost experts on our own bowel movements.
The question of how to conduct experiments on ourselves — of what to allow into our bodies and what to do with the refuse that emerges at the other end — has often been morally and politically vexed. The gut is the portal from inside to outside, the fragile barricade between self and other. Richardson writes that eating requires “taking something from the outside into the deep interior of the body,” and defecating involves expelling something from the domain of the self. It is not surprising, then, that hygiene has long been couched as a sign of social progress and, more sinisterly, a way of distinguishing civilized insiders from barbaric outsiders.
by Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Pegasus
[ed. Been a sufferer all my adult life with endless tests and zero cures, typical of most I imagine. It's an unpredictable and ever present issue that affects nearly every aspect of life, including social interactions, travel, which foods you're able to eat (or not), etc. Fortunately it also waxes and wanes. I'm pretty sure I'm not interested in reading a book that describes the historic struggle and hopelessness of it all. See also (the excellent): Sick to Our Stomachs|Why Does Everyone Have IBS? (The Drift).]
