Fearing the Danger Point: The Study and Treatment of Human Starvation in the United Kingdom and India, c. 1880–1974

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, nutritional scientists and physicians recognized the clinical symptoms of human starvation, which they regarded primarily as a protein deficiency. In the absence of large studies of advanced starvation, they could not, however, determine how long a normal person could live without food. British physicians and famine relief officers feared the illusive “danger point” at which a starving person could presumably suffer a deadly collapse. Scientists made dramatic advances in their understanding of human nutrition in the first half of the twentieth century. They learned that the most critical factors in starvation were deficiencies in amino acids, vitamins, and, above all, carbohydrates. Yet these advances were slow to influence the treatment of starvation by British physicians. Prison medical officers, in particular, continued to focus on protein in their diagnosis and forcible feeding of the growing number of hunger strikers in British, Irish, and Indian prisons. Long after nutritional scientists had abandoned the Victorian maxim that protein was “the only true nutrient,” prison medical officers continued to forcibly feed hunger strikers a liquid mixture of milk, eggs, beef, and brandy.