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Article ID: CBB845041561

‘The Grand Organ of Sympathy’: ‘Fashionable’ Stomach Complaints and the Mind in Britain, 1700–1850 (2019)

Kennaway, James Gordon (Author)
Andrews, Jonathan (Author)

Social History of Medicine
Volume: 32
Issue: 1
Pages: 57-79

URI: https://academic.oup.com/shm/article/32/1/57/4080244

DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkx055

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Although the nerves have often been at the centre of the historiographical discussion of the so-called fashionable diseases of Georgian Britain, the stomach and digestion have at least as much claim for consideration. Associations between excessive consumption and elite status lent a touch of glamour to digestive problems, while creating the basis for a critique that depicted stomach maladies as the result of excess, greed and immorality. The first section of this paper explores how the patient experience of these disorders related to their glamorous connotations. The second part then considers changing views of the relationship between the digestion and the mind, arguing that the stomach was very much at the heart of ideas of selfhood until the nineteenth century. The third section examines the reasons for the apparent decline of modish stomach complaints at the end of the Georgian era in terms of changing medical thinking and socio-cultural context.

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