With the ice-cream temptations of summer bearing down upon us, not to mention the strawberry and cream distractions of Wimbledon, we look into the origins of obesity as seen through the lens of the RCP library’s 20th century collections.
What we eat
In The Englishman’s food: a history of five centuries of English diet by JC Drummond (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), the author surveys the radical changes in our diet over time. In part one of the book, the dangers of tainted meat in the medieval and Tudor marketplace (as well as underweight bread, rancid butter and ‘faked and adulterated wines’) is vividly recalled.
It seems as if avoiding being poisoned by your food was an everyday preoccupation of medieval life; not to mention the dangers of unpalatable food. The use of spices was widespread to make tainted meat more edible and ‘Washing with vinegar was an obvious, and one of the commonest, procedures’. Other strong spices were also traded from Mediterranean countries and onions were imported in large quantities from Flanders.
In the sixteenth century cane-sugar also started to become popular; being used largely ‘for making marzipan and other sweetmeats’, and reducing in price due to increased trade with Madeira and the Canaries by the Portuguese.
The quality of diets in this era of course varied with social status and rank (with the medieval peasant who ate more fruit and vegetables generally having the superior diet), however we can see the foundations of later health problems such as binge drinking, excessive salt, and an over-reliance on sugar lurking in the shadows.
Our changing shape
In Obesity: the biography by Sander L Gilman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), the author shows how the obesity and over-indulgence has transmuted from a disease of the affluent to a disease of the poor. Obesity throughout the Western world – and also now in newly industrialised countries such as China – has become endemic with a whole new category of body-type emerging; the morbidly obese.
Gilman describes how in ancient times ‘the control of the body and its weight was an intrinsic part of religious belief. The ancient Greeks saw food as part of a complex web that connected human beings and the gods through the humours’. According to Hippocrates the harmony of the four humours – blood, choler, black bile and phlegm – were key to a person’s physical wellbeing and ‘if one had a natural predisposition to phlegm it resulted in fat.’ The phlegmatic person (poorly maligned in this hypothesis) was also ‘pale, lazy, inert, and cool in character’, although this could be due to old age and not just indolence.
The idea of the fat body as a sign of moral laxity grew through the ages and by the end of the eighteenth century ‘the idea that a weakness of will was the cause of obesity became a medical as well as a popular trope’. Samuel Johnson defined obesity in his Dictionary of the English language (1755) as ‘loaden with flesh’ and it is in this century that we see the term obesity first appearing and also pamphlets containing weight-loss stories and diets (most notably that of William Banting, an undertaker, who is referred to as the first ‘celebrity dieter’).
In the last chapter of the book the phenomenon of ‘globesity’ is explored and the nutritional pestilence of the ‘developed’ world is anatomized. In this world view, the concept of fatness is seen a product of globalization and modernity.
The utopian ‘undeveloped’ world, in Enlightenment jargon, the world of the ‘noble savage’, is a world in which ‘diseases of extravagance’ could not exist, as they are a reflex of a ‘civilized’ model of exploitation and capitalism.
Obesity is conceived as an inevitable consequence of our fall from Edenic grace and retreat from naturalism; our current preoccupation with ‘organic’ produce a simple reflection of our sublimated desire to return to Eden and the unpolluted world of our ancestors.
Read on…
These two books plus many more on the subject of food, nutrition, obesity and eating disorders can be found in the Wellcome Reading Room of the RCP Library in Regent’s Park. Explore our library catalogue to find out more.
Claire Sexton
Collections development librarian
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