Article ID: CBB339479544

Useful charlatans: Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti’s fasting contest in Paris, 1886 (2020)

unapi

This paper analyzes the public fasts of two Italian “hunger artists,” Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti, in Paris in 1886, and their ability to forego eating for a long period (thirty and fifty days respectively). Some contemporary witnesses described them as clever frauds, but others considered them to be interesting physiological anomalies. Controversies about their fasts entered academic circles, but they also spread throughout the urban public at different levels. First, Succi and Merlatti steered medical debates among physicians on the “scientific” explanations of the limits of human resistance to inanition, and acted as ideal mediators for doctors’ professional interests. Second, they became useful tools for science popularizers in their attempt to gain authority in drawing the boundaries between “orthodox” and “heterodox” knowledge. Finally, in the 1880s, Succi and Merlatti’s contest, the controversy around the liquids they ingested, and their scientific supervision by medical doctors, all reinforced their own professional status as itinerant fasters in a golden decade for that kind of endeavor. For all those reasons, Succi and Merlatti can be viewed as useful, epistemologically-active charlatans.

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Article Irina Podgorny; Daniel Gethmann (2020) 'Please, come in.' Being a charlatan, or the question of trustworthy knowledge. Science in Context (pp. 355-361). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB339479544/

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Authors & Contributors
Scott-Smith, Tom
Lara Pauline Karpenko
Elvbakken, Kari Tove
Biltekoff, Charlotte
Zurbrigg, Sheila
Stolberg, Michael
Concepts
Nutrition; dietetics
Human body
Medicine and culture
Human physiology
Medicine
Public health
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
Early modern
21st century
20th century, early
Places
France
Paris (France)
Argentina
Florence (Italy)
United States
Norway
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