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Article ID: CBB339479544

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

Science in Context
Volume: 33
Issue: 4
Pages: 405-422
Publication date: 2020
Language: English

DOI: 10.1017/S0269889721000168

URI: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/science-in-context/article/useful-charlatans-giovanni-succi-and-stefano-merlattis-fasting-contest-in-paris-1886/BF11A690B9F79591266854E41575A6BA

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Nutrition; dietetics Human body Human physiology Medicine and culture Charlatans Hunger 19th century Paris (France) Succi, Giovanni

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

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