IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB001561378

Managing American Bodies: Diet, Nutrition, and Obesity in America, 1840--1920 (2008)

Levine, Deborah I. (Author)

Harvard University

Publication Date: 2008
Physical Details: 279 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Weight management Nutrition; dietetics Public health Obesity 19th century 20th century, early United States

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.

...More

Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/04 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3312441.

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001561378/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

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 Park, Roberta J.; (2011)
Historical Reflections on Diet, Exercise, and Obesity: The Recurring Need to “Put Words into Action” (/isis/citation/CBB001250799/)

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 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/)

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/)

Book Biltekoff, Charlotte; (2013)
Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health (/isis/citation/CBB001452069/)

Book Karen Throsby; (2023)
Sugar rush: Science, politics and the demonisation of fatness (/isis/citation/CBB539001735/)

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/)

Book Nicolas Rasmussen; (2019)
Fat in the Fifties (/isis/citation/CBB964187680/)

Thesis Nan Zhou; (2015)
Understanding Parenting and Young Chinese Children's Risk for Obesity in the U.S. (/isis/citation/CBB010023303/)

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/)

Article Offer, Avner; (2001)
Body Weight and Self-Control in the United States and Britain since the 1950s (/isis/citation/CBB000770462/)

Book Vigarello, Georges; (2013)
The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity (/isis/citation/CBB001551002/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}