She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950, and reported the following:
Everyday experience shows that appetite is influenced by a multitude of factors, including our emotional state or desire to look a certain way, traditional family and regional preferences, and many others. Yet when scientists first began investigating the nature and workings of appetite in the later eighteenth century, they often tried to trace the spur of appetite to a single influence or mechanism. Page 99 of Appetite and Its Discontents concerns the effort made by experimentalists of the early nineteenth century to trace control of ingestion and digestion to the action of what were then called the “pneumogastric” (vagus) nerves. The experimental operation used was called “vagotomy,” and it was performed repeatedly in leading research centers. This page of the book looks at competing approaches taken by physiologists in Germany and France, two countries in which experimenting on live animals had become accepted procedure. In typical fashion, the German researchers tended to focus on the question of whether severing the vagus nerves would interrupt digestion – something that could be demonstrated physically by examining the products of the digestive process – whereas the French investigators sought, more broadly, to determine if their experimental animals ate, after the operation, “as before and with equal appetite.” Although in both settings these experiments yielded inconclusive results, they continued to be avidly pursued in Germany, France, and elsewhere.Learn more about Appetite and Its Discontents at the University of Chicago Press website.
The “page 99 test” does, I think, give a good idea of some of the main concerns and aims of this book. It indicates how appetite, once a matter of ordinary experience, came into being as a scientific “object.” This is a theme historians of science have pursued recently in relation to widely varying phenomena from dreams to monsters to walking. It also takes up the matter of long-term differences in approach evident in the work of German and French scientists. Both used vivisection (despite angry criticism in both countries of the “torture” of live animals in laboratories). But German investigators tended to adopt a more rigorously materialist view (could results be shown in straightforward physical terms?) whereas French researchers allowed greater scope for exploring immaterial phenomena such as desire (did post-operative animals really want to eat?). Finally, this discussion points both to the contested nature of the experimental results in question and to the persistent hope of researchers that improved technique would yield more uniform and reliable results.
A central theme that appears only obliquely on page 99 is the shift later in the nineteenth century to enhanced interest in the psychology of appetite. This move reflected not only the emergence of new “sciences of mind,” but, especially, the work of practitioners who observed troubled appetite in individuals suffering from psychic disturbance. Thus the latter parts of the book trace a new contest that unfolded in Europe and the U.S. between psychic and somatic approaches to appetite. The book ends with an Epilogue that looks at biomedical thinking about appetite in the present. In it I suggest that turning the tools of science on appetite, while yielding knowledge of value to a range of disciplines, has at the same time caused people to distrust their own appetite and to experience as a result uniquely modern anxieties about eating.
--Marshal Zeringue
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