Abstract
“The stomach rules the brain”: with that pithy maxim, Voltaire summed up much of the spirit of scholarly endeavor in the French Enlightenment. The stomach did, indeed, seem to rule the life of the mind in eighteenth-century France, a time when social pleasures like fine dining were central to the effort to redefine the modern intellectual as a public-spirited, convivial fellow eager to partake of worldly life.l Nowhere, it seems, did the French love of food and the equally French passion for ideas converge more harmoniously than in the mythic “repas philosophique,” the imaginary gathering of Voltaire and other famous talking heads that became one of the century’s canonical images.2 However, even in this golden age of intellectual sociability, the connection between the thinker’s mental and digestive pursuits was far from simple: although philosophes like Voltaire and Diderot were avid gourmands who disavowed the ascetic image of the scholar that had prevailed in the past, they were often ambivalent about the belly-centered excesses of their own era.3 They seemed, moreover, to regard the Republic of Letters as an institution plagued with indigestion—both the metaphorical indigestion induced by the flood of books issuing forth from writers great and small, and the literal indigestion that tormented those who overindulged in high living, the pursuit of learning, or both at once.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Steven Shapin’s contrast between the traditional, abstemious image of the scholar and the “sociable, merry, and moderately gormandizing philosopher of the eighteenth century,” in “The Philosopher and the Chicken: On the Dietetics of Disembodied Knowledge,” in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 43. Many scholars have emphasized the importance of sociability among eighteenth-century French intellectuals—and their aspiration to full membership in “polite” culture: see esp. Emmanuel Bury, Litterature et politesse: l’invention de l’honnete homme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996); and Gregory S. Brown, A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press/EPIC, 2002).
Christiane Mervaud discusses this and other engravings by Jean Huber in Voltaire a table: Plaisir du corps, plaisir de l’esprit (Paris: Editions Desjonqueres, 1998), 9–13.
“Diderot Gastronome,” in Georges May, Quatre visages de Denis Diderot (Paris: Boivin, 1951), 13–33; see Mervaud, Voltaire a table, esp. 17–94. On Voltaire, see also Jean Starobinski, “Le philosophe a table,” in Etre riche au siecle de Voltaire, J. Berchtold and M. Porret, eds. (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 279–293.
On the latter subject, see my essay “The Scholar’s Body: Health, Sexuality, and the Ambiguous Pleasures of Thinking in Eighteenth-Century France,” in The Eighteenth-Century Body:Art, History, Literature, Medicine, Angelica Goodden, ed. (NewYork: Peter Lang, 2002), 115–134.
The Montpellier-trained physician Gabriel Venel implied that those who fretted over petty ailments like “digestion fougueuse” suffered mainly from selfabsorption: he called them “the people who constantly observe or listen to themselves.” “Digestion,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert, eds. (Paris, 1751–1765; reprint, NewYork: Pergamon Press, 1969), vol. 4, 1002; author’s emphasis.
Noteworthy studies of this phenomenon include Didier Masseau, L’Invention de l’intellectuel dans l’Europe du XVIIIe siecle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994); Jean-Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Pantheon: Essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1998); and Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Anne-Charles Lorry, Essai sur les alimens, pour servir de commentaire aux livres dietiques d’Hippocrates (1754; second edition, Paris: Vincent, 1757), vol. 2, 210–211. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 441–473.
Interest in occupational diseases was influenced by Bartholemeo Rammazzini’s Treatise of the Diseases of Tradesmen (1700; English trans. London: 1705); Ibid., 455. Ranunazzini’s treatise included a long chapter on “The Diseases of Learned Men” that was commonly cited as a precursor in later medical manuals for scholars.
Lindsay Wilson, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 141–148.
Daniel Roche argues that physicians played a fundamental role in the cultivated society of eighteenth-century France—and in the effort to bathe great thinkers in an aura of posthumous heroism via glowing eulogies; see his chapter “Medecins et lumieres au XVIIIe siecle,” in Les Republicains des lettres: gens de culture et Lumieres au XVIIIe siecle (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 308–330.
On the use of Rousseauean themes by medical vitalists and vapors specialists, see Elizabeth A.Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), 147, 154, 223, 224, 242, 246. See also my study Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in theLiterature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 236–238.
Discours sur l’origine de l’inegalite parmi les hommes (1754), in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Editions de la Pleiade, 1964), vol. 3, 138.
On the manner in which eighteenth-century French physicians used the doctrine of the non-naturals—the six types of things that, according to ancient medicine, determined the body’s state of health or illness—see William Coleman,“Health and Hygiene in the Encyclopedie: A Medical Doctrine for the Bourgeoisie,” in Journal of the History of Medicine, 29 (1974), 399–421
Rousseau, “Preface a Narcisse,” cited by Samuel-Auguste-Andre-David Tissot, De la sante des gens de lettres (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981), 33.
Johann-Georg Zimmermann, Traite de l’experience en general, et en particulier dam l’art de guérir (original German edition 1763; French trans. by Le Febvre de Villebrune 1797; reed. Paris: A. Delahays, 1855), 480.
The practice of self-observation was fairly common among physicians writing on vaporous or nervous disorders: see, for instance, Pierre Pomme, Essai sur les affections vaporeuses des deux sexes (1760), cited by Elizabeth A. Williams in “Hysteria and the Court Physician,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:2 (2002), 249.
Elizabeth A. Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 38–39, 43–44, 51, 59. See also Roselyne Rey, Naissance et developpement du vitalisme en France de la deuxieme moitie du dix-huitieme siecle a la fin du Premier Empire (Oxford:Voltaire Foundation, 2000), 164–69.
Louis de Lacaze, Idee de l’homme physique et moral (Paris: Guerin et Delatour, 1755), 322, 341–343, 353. Lacaze argued that the true source of “philosophical spirit” resided in a “felicitous” disposition of the internal organs (413).
Recherches sur les maladies chroniques (1775) in Theophile de Bordeu, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Caille et Ravier, 1818), vol. 2, 831, 839.
Broussais’s De l’irritation et de la folie (1828) defined hypochondria and virtually all other mental disorders as arising from gastric irritation. On Broussais’s controversial proposition that “knowledge of gastroenteritis is the key to all pathology,” see Jean-Francois Braunstein, Broussais et le matérialisme. Médecine et philosophie au XIXe siecle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986), esp. 38–39.
See Roy Porter, “Barely Touching: A Social Perspective on Mind and Body: in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, G. S. Rousseau, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 45–80.
C. A. T. Charpentier, Essai sur la melancolie (Paris: Farge, an XI [1803]), 62–63 and 76.
Philippe Pinel, Nosographie philosophique, on la methode de l’analyse appliquee a la medecine (first ed. 1798; Paris: Maradan, 1813), 85.
See Juan Rigoli, Lire le delire: Aliénisme, rhetorique et littérature en France au XIX siecle (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 434–435 and passim.
For example see Etienne Brunaud, De l’hygiene des gens de lettres (1819), Joseph-Henri Reveille-Parise, Physiologie et Hygiene des hommes livrés aux travaux de l’esprit (1834; fourth edition [Paris: Dentu, 1843]), and Jean-Marie-Francois DelabigneVilleneuve’s 1834 medical thesis, Essai sur l’influence des passions et des travaux intellectuels sur l’economie et la sante de l’homme (Paris: Didot le Jeune, 1836).
Ibid., vol 2, 184–185. Voltaire often fretted over whether he could obtain enough cassia to maintain his heavy purgative regimen. See, for example, his letter of 12 October 1757 to Jean Robert Tronchin (Dr. Theodore Tronchin’s brother): “The affairs of Saxony can go as they please, but I can’t live without cassia … Cassia absorbs all of my ideas.” Letter 6720 in Voltaire’s Correspondence, Theodore Besterman, ed. (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1953–1965), vol. 32, 110.
“Epitre 76” (1748), in Voltaire, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Garnier, 1877), vol. 10, 344–349, here 346–347.
Julien Offray de la Mettrie, L’Homme-machine (1747; Paris: Editions Mille et une nuits, 2000).
On Henaut and Desfontaines, see Epitre 65 (1744) inVoltaire, Oeuvres completes, vol. 10, 327–328.Voltaire wrote two extensive letters on indigestion and cassia to Mme du Deffand in 1775; see Besterman, Correspondence, vol. 90, 34–35 and 174–175. Voltaire’s flattering poem on the colic of Frederick of Prussia is reprinted in Starobinski, “Le philosophe a table,” 280–281.
On Voltaire’s relations with the Tronchin family, see Deidre Dawson, Voltaire’s Correspondence: An Epistolary Novel (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 101–126. According to Andre Maurois,Voltaire was well known for using his frailty as a social weapon, exclaiming “Vite, vite, du Tronchin” and feigning indisposition when he didn’t wish to receive guests at Ferney. Dictionnaire des lettres franfaises: Le Dix-huitieme siecle (Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1960), vol. 2, 640, 655.
Brockliss and Jones identify Tronchin as “one of the first advocates of expectant medicine,” a physician who prescribed placebos for patients who insisted on being heavily medicated. The Medical World of Early Modern France, 572. On Tronchin’s attitude toward Voltaire as patient—and his effort to put an end to Voltaire’s “frightening” consumption of remedies—see Henri Tronchin, Theodore Tronchin: Un médecin du XVIIIe siecle (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1906), 149–150 and 160–165.
Voltaire wrote this tale soon after the death of Philip Stanhope, count of Chesterfield, who suffered from deafness in his final years; see “Note sur ‘Les Oreilles du comte de Chesterfield”’ in Voltaire, Romans et contes (Paris: Gamier Flammarion, 1966), 669. This was not the only text in which Voltaire linked digestion and hearing: Henri Tronchin cites an undated letter to Tronchin in which Voltaire remarked: “when the bowels are clear, the organ of hearing is, too.” Theodore Tronchin, 368.
See Mervaud, Voltaire a table, esp. 109–126, and Starobinki, “Le philosophe a table,” esp. 283–284. On the redemption of illness through fiction, see Evelyne Ender, “‘Speculating Carnally,’ or, Some Reflections on the Modernist Body” in Yale Journal of Criticism, 12:1 (1999), 113–130.
See, for example, Reveille-Parise’s evocation of Voltaire’s ideas on excretion in Hygiene oculaire (1816; third edition: Paris: Méquignon-Marvis, 1845), 38; and his detailed analysis of Voltaire’s illnesses in Physiologie et hygiene, vol. 2, 182–188.
See Roselyne Rey’s suggestive adaptation of the Foucauldian notion of “souci de soi” to the context of Enlightenment medicine, in “Hygiene et souci de soi dans la pensee medicate des Lumieres,” in Communications 56 (1993), 25–39.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 Christopher E. Forth and Ana Carden-Coyne
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vila, A.C. (2005). The Philosophe’s Stomach. In: Forth, C.E., Carden-Coyne, A. (eds) Cultures of the Abdomen. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981387_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981387_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52880-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8138-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)