Abstract
‘Why the most natural actions of a man’s life should be call’d his Non-Naturals’ was a paradox that delighted the eighteenth-century writer Laurence Sterne, and continues to amuse us today.1 The ‘non-naturals’ were precisely those things essential to health — air, food and drink, sleep, exercise, excretions and the passions — that were not considered natural in themselves because they were liable, through abuse or accident, to become the cause of disease. They affected but were not part of a person’s constitution. Physicians therefore encouraged individuals to regulate their daily lives through knowledge of these effects on their own bodies. The non-naturals had to be used variously and judiciously to stimulate the nurturing and healing qualities of nature. It was the correct functioning of the body that was considered ‘natural’.2
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Notes
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 66.
Antoinette Emch-Dériaz, ‘The Non-naturals Made Easy’, in The Popularization of Medicine 1650–1850, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge 1992), pp. 134–59.
Adam Ferguson, quoted in Roy Porter, Enlightenment (London: Penguin Books 2000), p. 295.
C. Anne Wilson, ‘From Garden to Table: How Produce was Prepared for Immediate Consumption’, in C. Anne Wilson, ed., The Country House Kitchen Garden 1600–1950 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1998), pp. 144–61, at 153;
Malcolm Thick, ‘Superior Vegetables’, Food Culture and History, 1 (1993): 132–51, at 139.
Roy Porter, ‘Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds, Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 58–81.
Susan Campbell, Walled Kitchen Gardens (Princes Risborough: Shire Publications, 2002), pp. 6–9.
Lorraine Daston, ‘Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment’, in Lorraine Deston and Fernando Vidal, eds, The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 100–26, quotation p. 118.
William Cowper, The Task, Book III, lines 446–51, 460–2, 544–52. In Cowper: Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, 4th edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ‘William Cowper’.
Ted Dadswell, The Selborne Pioneer. Gilbert White as Naturalist and Scientist: A Reexamination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 7–15, 19. In contrast to the price of early fruit, summer cucumbers were two for 1½d . See Cries of London (London: F. Newbery, 1775), p. 70.
Simon Schaffer, ‘The Earth’s Fertility as a Social Fact in Early Modern England’, in Mikulas Teich, Roy Porter and Bo Gustafsson, eds, Nature and Society in Historical Context, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 124–47.
Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 202.
John Harvey, Early Nurserymen (London: Phillimore, 1974), p. 92.
Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 3–4.
See also Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates’, in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 7–27.
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© 2007 Anne Secord
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Secord, A. (2007). Hotbeds and Cool Fruits: The Unnatural Cultivation of the Eighteenth-century Cucumber. In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_8
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