Levine, Deborah I. (Author)
This dissertation explores important changes in American public perception of and behavior toward diet and weight management. Focus in American public discourse on diet, nutrition, and obesity increased dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century. Certainly, there had been some level of continued concern about extreme fatness or extreme thinness throughout history. But as the nineteenth century progressed, a person's weight and approach to diet was explicitly recast as an outward indicator of the self-control and discipline required to succeed in American society. As reliance on medical expertise became a more integral part of healthcare, physician-prescribed dietary regimens and a person's ability to comply with them came to be defined both in clinical and popular literature as a reliable symbol of an individual's personal character. Diverse and distinct literatures, including clinical medical texts, scientific papers, domestic medical guidebooks, life insurance policies, popular advice literature, and newspaper articles all began to give more attention to nutrition, weight, and health. These texts did more than merely create a new philosophy of regulated eating. They created a discourse on diet and nutrition that resulted in a new way of understanding the body in nineteenth century America, and they employed an explicitly disease-oriented approach for understanding the problem of "overweight," or "corpulence." Increasingly, these texts referred to the problem of "obesity" in medical terms. This work sheds light on the complex tensions between professional and lay authorities and between moral and healthful ways of living that are responsible for this transition. By analyzing several literatures and archival sources that are convergent on nutrition, obesity, regimen, and the body, "Managing American Bodies" illuminates the origins of a disease-centered framework for understanding obesity while also increasing understanding of the history of American notions of nutrition, measurement, health and society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/04 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3312441.
Article
Nicolas Rasmussen;
(2018)
Group Weight Loss and Multiple Screening: A Tale of Two Heart Disease Programs in Postwar American Public Health
(/isis/citation/CBB293285264/)
Book
Segrave, Kerry;
(2008)
Obesity in America, 1850--1939: A History of Social Attitudes and Treatment
(/isis/citation/CBB000951770/)
Article
Parr, Jessica M.;
(2014)
Obesity and the Emergence of Mutual Aid Groups for Weight Loss in the Post-War United States
(/isis/citation/CBB001550974/)
Article
Park, Roberta J.;
(2011)
Historical Reflections on Diet, Exercise, and Obesity: The Recurring Need to “Put Words into Action”
(/isis/citation/CBB001250799/)
Article
La Berge, Ann F.;
(2008)
How the Ideology of Low Fat Conquered America
(/isis/citation/CBB000774475/)
Book
Sabrina Strings;
(2019)
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
(/isis/citation/CBB280233988/)
Book
Karen Throsby;
(2023)
Sugar rush: Science, politics and the demonisation of fatness
(/isis/citation/CBB539001735/)
Book
Biltekoff, Charlotte;
(2013)
Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health
(/isis/citation/CBB001452069/)
Article
Stolberg, Michael;
(2012)
“Abhorreas Pinguedinem”: Fat and Obesity in Early Modern Medicine (c. 1500--1750)
(/isis/citation/CBB001221620/)
Book
Christopher E. Forth;
(2019)
Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life
(/isis/citation/CBB439415836/)
Article
Knigh, Christine;
(2011)
“Most People Are Simply Not Designed to Eat Pasta”: Evolutionary Explanations for Obesity in the Low-Carbohydrate Diet Movement
(/isis/citation/CBB001250091/)
Thesis
Nan Zhou;
(2015)
Understanding Parenting and Young Chinese Children's Risk for Obesity in the U.S.
(/isis/citation/CBB010023303/)
Book
Nicolas Rasmussen;
(2019)
Fat in the Fifties
(/isis/citation/CBB964187680/)
Article
Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina;
(2005)
The Culture of the Abdomen: Obesity and Reducing in Britain, circa 1900-1939
(/isis/citation/CBB000660023/)
Book
Foxcroft, Louise;
(2012)
Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 Years
(/isis/citation/CBB001200874/)
Article
Alexandre-Bidon, Danièle;
(2012)
Enflures et boursouflures. L'obésité au Moyen Âge
(/isis/citation/CBB001420812/)
Book
Wendy Mitchinson;
(2018)
Fighting Fat: Canada, 1920-1980
(/isis/citation/CBB163094871/)
Article
Nicolas Rasmussen;
(2019)
Downsizing obesity: On Ancel Keys, the origins of BMI, and the neglect of excess weight as a health hazard in the United States from the 1950s to 1970s
(/isis/citation/CBB762466362/)
Book
Vigarello, Georges;
(2013)
The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity
(/isis/citation/CBB001551002/)
Book
Gilman, Sander L.;
(2010)
Obesity: The Biography
(/isis/citation/CBB001022748/)
Be the first to comment!