Our Troubles with Food E-Book

Stephen Halliday

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

For millennia the normal, natural and pleasurable activity of eating has been surrounded by fear and anxiety. Religious traditions have long decreed what foods are right for their followers to eat, but secularisation and scientific progress have not made the situation easier. Our present obsession with health, obesity, ethics and science has seemingly developed from a society that is over-supplied with the necessities of life. For the first time, social historian Stephen Halliday looks at the history of our fascinating relationship with food, from Galen in the first century AD declaring that fruit was the worst kind of food to eat, to John Kellogg's belief that eating wholegrain cereals would prevent masturbation and bring people closer to God. Through modern fears and food scares such as mad cow disease to our current fascination with superfoods, 'friendly' bacteria and organic farming, Our Troubles with Food is a thorough analysis of our changing attitudes towards food and a reminder that we are not so very different from our forbears after all.

Leseprobe

Our Troubles with

FOOD

Our Troubles with

FOOD

FEARS, FADS AND FALLACIES

Stephen Halliday

First published 2009

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Stephen Halliday, 2009, 2013

The right of Stephen Halliday to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9627 6

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Introduction

1Fears, Fads and Fallacies

2The Staffs of Life

3‘Man’s War against Nature’

4Diseases of Deficiency

5Nutrition or Just Calories?

6‘Deadly Adulterations and Slow Poisoning’

7A Century of Excess

Notes

Bibliography

Introduction

Until comparatively recently mankind has had good reason to worry about where its next meal was coming from. In 1585 Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer, William Cecil (1520–98), reflected upon the comparative tranquillity that had marked the first twenty-seven years of the queen’s reign and attributed this, at least in part, to the fact that there had been no harvest failures in that time. This was not to last. In the next half century poor harvests occurred regularly and helped to account both for the discontents that marked Elizabeth’s last years and the upheavals that led to the Civil War and the death of Charles I. It was not until the early nineteenth century that a national network of canals, and later railways, made it feasible to transport bulky crops from areas of plenty to areas of need, while later in that century new methods of storing and preserving surplus crops made it feasible for the abundance of one year to supplement the shortages of another. Nor were these problems confined to England. Harvest failures in France in the later eighteenth century fanned the discontent that led to the French Revolution. And even when food was available from cheap and abundant sources in America and Australasia much of the British population remained malnourished. In the last years of Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901) forty per cent of volunteers to serve in the Boer War were rejected because they were too small as a result of poor nutrition.

By the time of the Boer War the poor condition of the population owed as much to ignorance as to poverty. The mediaeval English diet was a relatively healthy one which was fortunate since most people were required to undertake hard manual work, often as agricultural labourers in small rural communities. Its chief component was ‘pottage’, a stew of fresh seasonal vegetables, pulses, cereals and, where affordable, a little meat. This was supplemented by milk, seasonal fruit and by bread baked from unrefined flour – that it to say flour which contained most of the bran and other elements which are removed by the refining process which produces flour for white bread. This diet, cheap and strongly vegetarian in character, contains all the nutrients required for healthy, strenuous living including carbohydrates, protein, vitamins, minerals and a little fat. The mediaeval diet was very similar to that provided in a later century for the orphans of the Foundling Hospital, founded in London in 1739 by Thomas Coram. It provided its charges with ‘all the produce of the kitchen garden’ – vegetables and fruits grown by the children themselves – as well as milk and meat.

In the intervening centuries some members of the British population were less well-nourished than their ancestors had been. A preference for white bread made from refined flour, with much of the bran removed, was established by the end of the sixteenth century and remained in place for 400 years. Only in the late twentieth century was much of the British population weaned off white bread and persuaded to re-adopt the healthier wholemeal bread which their ancestors had eaten through necessity. Another component of the mediaeval countryman’s diet, fresh milk, fell from the diets of that substantial proportion of the population which, in the course of Victoria’s reign, became town rather than country dwellers. The completion of the railway network in the latter part of the nineteenth century made it possible to deliver milk fresh to distribution points in towns and cities, though it was not until the early twentieth century that its buyers could feel reasonably sure that the milk was free of pollutants, including tuberculosis bacteria.

At the same time that milk depots were being set up by local authorities in cities like Liverpool to ensure that the product was safe to drink, others were fighting to prevent the deliberate adulteration of food in the interests of appearance and profit. The habit of adding alum to bread to give it the desired whiteness; of adding copper to pickles to give them a nice green hue; and of adding lead to vinegar to give a passable wine was widespread until the passing of the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1875. Also at this time a small band of scientists was beginning to understand that certain undetectable components of the food supply, known at first as ‘accessory food factors’ were essential to human health. In 1900 it had been known for three centuries that the consumption of lemons provided protection against scurvy, but it was not until 1912 that the word vitamin entered the language. Other connections between diet and disease were soon to be made in the case of conditions like rickets and beri beri. An understanding of the role of vitamins in human health was to win many Nobel Prizes in the twentieth century.

In the twentieth century, as we have approached a full understanding of the essential components of the human diet and as agricultural science has enabled mankind to produce enough food for everyone, the issue has been clouded by three further factors. The first is the decline in physical activity in the population of the developed world. The human physique, which has evolved over millennia to cope with hard physical labour, has found itself in developed economies with a rapidly diminishing burden of physical work. Hard labour in the fields and mines has given way to the clicking of a computer mouse or the management of a robot. Walking and cycling to work have been replaced by motoring. At the same time we are encouraged, by the imperatives of a consumer society and its food processors, to eat more than our ancestors and, consequently, much more than we need. The third and most discussed factor concerns the use of chemical additives to preserve our food and to give it colour and taste. This is the issue that has provoked most alarm and criticism from consumer movements and lobbyists particularly, though not exclusively, in the USA.

In 2006 a conference was held in Istanbul by the World Health Organisation which drew attention to the fact that a large and growing proportion of the population of the developed world is overweight or obese, and this was confirmed by a UK government report in 2007. In the course of a century we have moved from the under-nourished Boer War volunteers to overweight citizens of an affluent society. This book examines mankind’s faltering journey along that food chain.

1

B

Fears, Fads and Fallacies

What is it for? How does it work?

A few years hence, when the connection between the poor feeding of mothers and children and subsequent poor physique and poor health is as clearly understood as the connection between a contaminated water supply and cholera, the suggestion that a diet fully adequate for health should be available for everyone will be regarded as reasonable and in accordance with common sense as is the preservation of our domestic water from pollution.

John Boyd Orr writing in Food, Health and Income, 1937

If thou are dull and heavy after Meat it is a sign that thou has exceeded due measure; for Meat and Drink ought to refresh the Body and make it cheerful and not dull or oppress it.

Benjamin Franklin

One of the greatest demonstrations in public health administration that the world has ever seen.

American Public Health Association, referring to the British diet in the Second World War

Why Do We Need Food?

When the distinguished nutritionist John Boyd Orr (1880–1971) wrote the words which head this chapter he may have been aware of the struggle which some of his Victorian predecessors had mounted to persuade their contemporaries that polluted water and epidemics of cholera, typhoid and dysentery were connected. Eminent authorities like Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890) and Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) went to their graves believing that epidemics were caused by foul air rather than infected water. In 1949 the by then Baron Boyd Orr won the Nobel Peace Prize for his nutritional research. Yet he cannot have anticipated that he and his fellow nutritionists would have as great a struggle persuading their political masters and their fellow citizens of the need for a healthy diet as had their antecedents in their campaigns for clean water. Many of the difficulties which he and his successors faced arose from widespread ignorance, even amongst the medical profession, of the roles of different foods in human health – of the need for quality as well as quantity in the foods ingested and of the need to understand what ‘quality’ meant. Many believe that this battle is still being fought.

It is therefore not surprising that the increase in the standard of living and of life expectancy, even amongst the poor, which had characterised the reign of Victoria in Great Britain, was not accompanied by a proportionate improvement in physical well-being. When Victoria came to the throne in 1837 the average lifespan of her subjects was about thirty-eight years. At the time of her death in 1901 this had risen to about fifty-two years. From the 1870s the cost of staple foods fell by as much as 30 per cent as policies of free trade encouraged the importation of cheap foods from Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Europe. During the same period wages rose by 65 per cent1 so that most Victorians were able to afford more nourishing food than their fathers, if they knew what ‘more nourishing’ meant. Yet at the end of Victoria’s reign, 40 per cent of those volunteering for service in the Boer War were rejected on medical grounds, despite the fact that the minimum height requirement for the army was reduced from 5ft 3in to 5ft,2 a phenomenon which supports the claim of Boyd Orr’s fellow nutritionist Sir Jack Drummond that ‘the opening of the twentieth century saw malnutrition more rife in England than it had been since the great dearths of mediaeval and Tudor times’.3

Sir Jack Drummond (1891–1952): born in Leicester, gained a first-class degree in chemistry at East London College in 1912 before joining King’s College, London, as a research assistant in 1913 where he undertook studies of human nutrition. During the First World War he worked on the development of margarines as butter substitutes and became interested in the role of vitamins in human diet. In 1920 he argued, successfully, that the word vitamin should replace the earlier usage vitamine on scientific grounds. In 1922 he was appointed to the new post of professor of biochemistry at University College, London, where he wrote his seminal study of the English diet over five centuries, a task he shared with his secretary and future wife, Anne Wilbraham. It was published in 1939 as The Englishman’s Food: Five Centuries of English Diet and is still in print, read as a standard text. During the Second World War he worked with John Boyd Orr as adviser to Lord Woolton, Minister of Food, their achievement being not just to maintain but to improve the diet of the British population in the face of wartime privation. In August 1952, Drummond, along with his wife Anne and ten-year-old daughter, were sensationally murdered while camping in France. Gaston Dominici, a peasant farmer on whose land the family was camping, was gaoled for the murder, but later pardoned.

How could it be that the greater abundance of affordable food, accompanied by a rise in wages, coincided with such poor physical condition for much of the population? This paradox can be partly attributed to the problems of adulteration which are examined in chapter six but much of the blame lies with contemporary ignorance of the basic principles of nutrition.

Early Theories of Nutrition

Theories concerning the amounts and types of food needed for humans to thrive are found as early as the works of Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 380 bc), whose texts were in reality the product of many writers spread over six centuries. His writings postulated, correctly, that the quantity of food necessary for health depends upon the constitution of the individual, the energy expended and the season. However, Hippocrates’ theories of nutrition were inextricably bound up with his theory of ‘Humours’ which were adopted, developed and propagated by Galen (131–201 ad) in Christian Europe and bedevilled the practice of medicine for more than two millennia. Galen, who was Greek by birth and appointed medical attendant to the Roman gladiator school in Pergamon in Asia Minor, was regarded favourably in mediaeval Europe, partly because, as a believer in one God, he was more acceptable to the ecclesiastical hierarchy than were most authorities from the ancient world. Through the influence of Galen, ‘Complexions’ (better described as personality types) and ‘Qualities’ were in turn associated with Humours, as shown in the table below.4

Complexion Sanguine Phlegmatic Choleric Melancholic

Corresponding Humour Blood Phlegm Yellow or Green Bile Black Bile

Corresponding Qualities Hot and Moist Cold and Moist Hot and Dry Cold and Dry

To these were added the four ‘Elements’ of earth, fire, water and air, derived from the writings of Aristotle, of which all matter was thought to be composed and which were, in turn, associated with the four Humours. Disorders in any one of the Humours would account for different types of illness and it followed that persons endowed with a certain ‘complexion’ should favour certain foods which complemented their characteristics and avoid those which exacerbated them. Galen was particularly severe in his view of fruit, claiming that his father had lived to the age of 100 by avoiding their consumption. Moreover, children were considered to be phlegmatic and should avoid foods and drinks categorised as cold or moist, these being deemed to include water, milk, fruits and lamb. Otherwise, it was feared, diarrhoea or worse would follow. For the same reason nursing mothers and wet nurses were advised to avoid these nutrients, advice which, where it was followed, presumably set back the cause of nutrition by centuries. The theories were not unchallenged even in classical times. Thus Cato the Elder (234–149 bc), who is chiefly remembered as a soldier and statesman, expressed the view that the consumption of cabbage was a sovereign remedy for all conditions – or, better still, the consumption of the urine of one who had eaten cabbage. There is no record of his prescription being widely adopted.

The mediaeval English diet, particularly in rural areas, was nutritious, as it needed to be given the hard physical work that it had to sustain. The most common food was ‘pottage’ consisting of a mixture of seasonal green vegetables, pulses, cereals and sometimes meat, cooked in a pot suspended over an open fire. To these would be added herbs including, from the fourteenth century, rosemary and saffron which had first been imported as medicines and later cultivated locally as foods. Many years later Sir Jack Drummond commended the qualities of a very similar diet consumed by people in developing countries: ‘wholemeal cereals, mixed vegetables and dairy produce … Little meat is eaten but the staple diet is a coarse, whole-grained bread, thick vegetable stews and goats’ milk cheese’.5

By the fifteenth century dried fruits were making their appearance in the form of currants from Spain, together with ginger, cloves and cinnamon and in the following century oranges and lemons, which were becoming available in London and other large towns along with locally grown apricots, spinach, parsley and sauerkraut.6 By this time lettuce was also available in about a dozen varieties whereas Henry VIII’s first queen, Catherine of Aragon, had sought it in vain when she came to England earlier in the century to marry his elder brother. Some foods were regarded as ‘wholesome’ because they promoted health while ‘physic herbs’ were seen as medicines to cure disease. One of the earliest English recipe books, The Widowes Treasure, published by ‘a gentlewoman’ in 1585, has as its first concern the use of food as medicine. Sage was considered to be good for the brain and was the subject of poems celebrating its virtues including one by Sir John Harington (1561–1612), better remembered as the inventor of the water closet:

But who can write thy worth O sovereign sage? Some ask how men can die where thou dost grow …

The theories of Hippocrates, as mediated by Galen, were brought to Europe by one Constantine the African via the Medical School at Salerno. They were propagated by a document called Regimen Sanitas Salerni, which may have been compiled at the request of Robert, eldest son of William the Conqueror in the late eleventh century and thereby came to influence English practice.7 The Regimen particularly disapproved of feeding apples, pears and milk to the sick but popularised the practice of bleeding, thereby inflicting great harm on the practice of medicine for centuries. Yet the milk of wet nurses was given to the elderly infirm, one of the beneficiaries being Dr John Caius (1510–73), second founder of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.8 The Regimen went almost unchallenged for 500 years though there were occasional sallies on behalf of individual foodstuffs like that made by Cato the Elder on behalf of cabbage. Thus Andrew Boorde (c.1490–1549), who left the Carthusian order in the face of Henry VIII’s persecutions, travelled throughout Europe at the behest of the king’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, and became convinced that rhubarb was a cure for many conditions – a plant he duly introduced to Henry’s kingdom for the first time. Other new foods were given a more hostile reception in some quarters. Thus the potato, introduced to Europe by the Spaniards who brought it from South America in the late sixteenth century, was blamed for an outbreak of leprosy shortly after its arrival in Burgundy.9 Sugar, being associated with fruit, was also regarded with suspicion though Frederick Slare (1646–1727), a physician, Fellow of the Royal Society and contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton, wrote an essay entitled ‘A Vindication of Sugars’ in which he observed that the preservative powers of sugars meant that they could not be all bad.10

In the following century the work of chemists undermined the theory of the four ‘Elements’ and, with it, the infrastructure of the ‘Humoral’ theories of Hippocrates and Galen. Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) showed that Aristotle’s element ‘air’ consisted of more than one chemical, one of which, oxygen, he described as ‘dephlogisticated air’. Similarly, Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) discovered hydrogen, which had no place in the ancient theories. Robert Boyle (1627–91) in The Sceptical Chemist (1661) made it clear that he disagreed in every way with the theory of the four Elements and all that proceeded from them. There was, however, little to put in their place as a dietary model to promote a healthy population apart from some highly subjective, if patriotic, sentiments such as those expressed by one Robert Campbell in a publication entitled The London Tradesman. In it, he declared, in 1747, that ‘In the days of good Queen Elizabeth mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s Food’ and went on to complain of ‘French Fashion … Spices, Pickles and Sauces, not to relish but to disguise our Food’.11 Galen’s firm opposition to the consumption of fruit continued to hold sway, its ‘evil, pernicious qualities’ being condemned by a writer called Aubrey who appears to have been a ship’s doctor, from which one may infer that any ship’s company to whom he administered was exceptionally likely to suffer from scurvy.12

Chewing and Chemistry

At about the same time that Boyle was at work, a number of continental writers were studying the processes by which food was absorbed by the human body. Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) was born near Leiden in Holland and, fortunately for the cause of science, was diverted from his early intention to enter the church in favour of a career in medicine, in which he graduated from Leiden’s famous medical school. From 1701 he worked as a lecturer at Leiden and attracted the admiration of Peter the Great, Voltaire and Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote a biography of him. He suggested that, having been ground by the teeth, food passed into the stomach where it was transformed into chyle. This substance was then mixed with blood and carried along the arteries to those parts of the body where it was needed at which point, under pressure from the blood, it was converted into the materials needed to replenish the body. This represents the beginnings of an understanding of how food is converted into energy and tissue.

Rene-Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur (1683–1757) was born in La Rochelle, studied at a Jesuit college and devoted his life to the study of a wide range of scientific subjects including the digestive processes of birds, arguing that digestion was promoted by chemical processes in the birds’ digestive systems rather than by the action of grinding, as done by human teeth. Another product of Jesuit education, the Italian Abbé Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–99) supported this hypothesis, thus leading towards an understanding of the role of gastric juices in the digestive process. The Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94), one of the founders of the modern science of chemistry, was carrying out experiments on animals which showed the relationship between food, energy and heat which, if he had been allowed to complete them, could have advanced the understanding of nutrition by decades. Unfortunately, the generous income which enabled him to devote his time to scientific experiment was derived from his position as a ‘farmer’ of taxes – that is to say a tax-gatherer – and although he appears to have conducted this business with an unusual degree of probity, it was enough to condemn him in the eyes of the revolutionary government which came to power in France in 1793. His pioneering work was ended when he was arrested, tried and executed in one day in May 1794. The judge who presided over his trial, upon learning of Lavoisier’s eminence as a scientist, declared that ‘the revolution does not need scientists’,13 thereby dealing a blow to the development of the science of nutrition as well as that of chemistry.

Dieting to Death

A more heroic, if misguided test of the role of food for humans was undertaken by an English doctor called William Stark in 1769. He was probably born in the then small town of Birmingham14 in about 1740 and studied medicine at Glasgow and Edinburgh universities, moving to London in 1765 to study with the distinguished physician John Hunter (1728–93). He was more successful in making influential friends than in obtaining jobs, since he failed to gain the post of physician at St George’s Hospital despite being one of its governors. He did, however, befriend Benjamin Franklin who was in London at the time and also Sir John Pringle (1707–82). Pringle was physician to the army, later to George III, and was a man whose opinions carried much weight in the medical world. He became President of the Royal Society which august body awarded him its prestigious Copley Medal for his confident (if false) assertion that sweet wort, a by-product of the brewing process, mixed with sugar, was a remedy against scurvy.15 Benjamin Franklin informed Stark that, when a younger man, he had lived on a weekly vegetarian diet of water and bread,16 expressing his doubts about the value of meat by adding: ‘If thou are dull and heavy after Meat it is a sign that thou has exceeded due measure; for Meat and Drink ought to refresh the Body and make it cheerful and not dull or oppress it.’17 Pringle told Stark that Greeks lived on a diet of currants, adding that one lady of his acquaintance, aged ninety, lived entirely on mutton fat. Such tales survived well into the nineteenth century, sometimes taking more extreme forms. In 1809 Ann Moore, ‘The Fasting Woman of Tutbury’ in Staffordshire, claimed to have eaten, drunk and excreted nothing for five years and was widely believed. It was probably Pringle’s confident advice that aroused Stark’s interest in nutrition and led him to undertake the experiment that led to his untimely death.

In June 1769, he announced: ‘It will afford me singular pleasure if I can prove by experiment that a pleasant and varied diet is equally conducive to health, with a more strict and simple one’.18 On 12 June 1769, he embarked upon the diet, a healthy male, aged twenty-nine, weighing 12st 3lb. He kept a daily account of the weather, the food ingested, the change in his weight and ‘the number and total weight of my stools’. For ten weeks he lived on water and between 20 and 38oz of bread daily, permitting himself the addition of some sugar for an interval of two weeks. At the end of this time he had lost a stone in weight and his gums were swollen and bleeding – almost certainly as a result of scurvy. This was followed by a period of eighteen days when he consumed a diet of meat, milk and wine and a further period of almost eight weeks when he confined himself to bread, meat and water. He recorded such afflictions as ‘blackened gums’ with ‘foetid white fluff round their edges’. For a further month, taking him to 26 December, he lived off ‘puddings’ consisting of flour, various oils and water before moving on to a diet of bread, meat and currants, the last of these possibly introduced as a result of Pringle’s reassuring advice about the Greek practice referred to above (Pringle was monitoring the experiment). Stark next planned to switch to a diet of fruit and vegetables which would presumably have been his salvation but for unknown reasons he decided instead to confine himself to honey puddings and Cheshire cheese. On 14 January 1770 his health took a turn for the worse and he died on the 23rd, racked with scurvy and a martyr to the cause of science. His last diary entry was: ‘Nothing passes through me, except sometimes a little wind upwards or downwards, and that without relief’.19 At no stage in his record does Stark record anxiety or dismay at the course of events. Rarely can anyone have made such a sacrifice in the cause of science. Sir John Pringle’s reaction to Stark’s heroic, if misguided, experiment is unrecorded.

The Balanced Diet

Further and surer steps towards an understanding of the connections between diet and health were taken by William Cullen (1710–90). Born in Lanarkshire, he studied medicine at Edinburgh and Glasgow, at which latter university he first demonstrated the techniques of refrigeration, though without applying them in any practical way.20 It was at Edinburgh that he became a renowned lecturer in chemistry and medicine, revealing himself to be a strong opponent of the ‘Humoral’ doctrines that still prevailed in many quarters. A friend of Adam Smith and David Hume, his influence extended far beyond Scotland, not least because he was amongst the first to attempt a classification (or ‘nosology’) of diseases in relation to their symptoms. His lectures were published in 1789 as A Treatise on Materia Medica, in which he showed some awareness of the need for what we would now call a ‘balanced diet’. Thus he suggested that vegetables like cucumbers could ‘allay the heat of meat’ in big flesh eaters. Jonas Hanway (1712–86),21 in his Letters on The Importance of the Rising Generation, published in 1767, had noted that some families who could not afford much meat had found ways of making their portions go further, with beneficial results: ‘With the addition of legumens, roots and vegetables, 5lb weight of meat will go as far as we generally make ten or fifteen and the consumer will be more free of the scurvy’.22 What Hanway did not know was that such a diet, resembling the peasant ‘pottage’ commended by Jack Drummond, was rich in vitamins – essential elements of the diet which had to wait a century and a half before they were identified and understood.

The concept of the balanced diet revolved around the theories of asescence (acid-bearing) and alkalescence (alkaline) which were emerging at this time from the comparatively new science of chemistry. Vegetables, and the formerly suspect fruit, were held to provide acid to the diet while cheese, eggs and meat, especially red meat, were believed to provide the alkaline component. In 1776 a Dr William Smith, who besides being a practising doctor was also an author of medical textbooks, wrote A Sure Guide in Sickness and in Health in the Choice of Food and Use of Medicine, the title of which carries its own significance since it clearly indicated a connection between diet and health. Smith observed that southern Europeans habitually consumed far more fruit than the English, with no harmful consequences despite Galen’s teachings to the contrary. Smith also suggested that ‘People in general eat too much’, in turn suggesting that his circle was confined to those prosperous citizens who were not constantly worried by poverty. His book also expressed clearly the acid/alkaline theory of the time:

When a person attempts to live upon flesh meat alone, though it be fresh, his appetite becomes keener, and even ravenous; and nature will crave for some acids and vegetables to correct the alkaline acrimony of the blood. And when he lives upon vegetables alone, whereby the stomach will contract an acid tendency he will find a craving for animal food to temperate the acidities.23

The science may not have been wholly correct but neither was it wholly wrong, as Galen had been in eschewing fruit, and Smith was making a case for what later came to be understood as a balanced diet.

As the nineteenth century approached, others attempted to carry out experiments on the effects of diets on animals. The French physiologist Francois Magendie (1783–1855) is most often remembered for his research into the human nervous system and for some brutal exercises in the vivisection of dogs which attracted the criticism of Charles Darwin, but he is also credited with measuring the effects upon dogs of different diets. He discovered, by experiment, that dogs fed on coarse, dark bread thrived while those whose bread was made from high grade wheat flour, producing white bread, soon died. Likewise, dogs fed on boiled egg whites suffered sore skin and loss of hair. Without knowing it, Magendie was observing the effects of a diet deficient in certain vitamins.

‘The Man with the Lid on his Stomach’

In June 1822, Alexis St Martin (1794–1880), an employee of the American Fur Company, was accidentally shot on an island in Lake Huron, off the coast of Michigan. St Martin’s birth name was Alexis Bidigan dit (i.e. known as) St Martin but he was known throughout his long and remarkable career as a human guinea pig by the name St Martin. Born in Canada of French descent, he was working as a ‘voyageur’ whose job was to paddle cargo-carrying canoes along rivers and carry them over rapids, from which we may conclude that he was reasonably fit and strong. He needed to be. Dr William Beaumont (1785–1853), a US Army surgeon, was at hand and treated the injured man whose wound was thought to be fatal. In Beaumont’s words:

The wound was received just under the left breast and supposed, at the time, to be fatal. A large portion of the side was blown off, the ribs fractured and openings made into the cavities of the chest and abdomen, through which protruded portions of the lungs and stomach, much lacerated and burnt … The diaphragm was lacerated and a perforation made directly into the cavity of the stomach, through which breakfast food was escaping.

Beaumont cleaned and dressed the wound and predicted that St Martin would be dead within thirty-six hours. Nevertheless St Martin made a slow recovery and within four weeks was eating and digesting his food normally. The wound eventually healed in such a way as to leave a permanent hole (a gastric fistula) in the side of St Martin’s body which had to be plugged with a dressing to prevent his meals exiting from his body by this unconventional route. St Martin entered Beaumont’s household, working as a handyman, while enabling the doctor to observe the processes of digestion and to carry out experiments on gastric juices. As Beaumont himself wrote in the American Medical Recorder in 1825:

This case affords a most excellent opportunity of experimenting upon the gastric fluids and the process of digestion. It would give no pain, nor cause the least uneasiness, to extract a gill of fluid every two or three days, for it frequently flows out spontaneously in considerable quantities; and one might introduce various digestible substances into the stomach and easily examine them during the whole process of digestion. I may therefore be able hereafter to give some interesting experiments on these subjects.24

There is some dispute about whether Beaumont’s scientific curiosity overcame his medical ethics. It has been suggested that Beaumont could have operated on St Martin to close the fistula but left it open, closed only by a dressing, so that he could carry out his experiments. Beaumont, however, claimed that this was ‘an operation to which the patient would not submit’.25 It should, however, be noted that St Martin lived to the age of eighty-six, married and sired six children, so his peculiar physiognomy does not appear to have acted as an inhibiting influence on his life. Nevertheless, he tired of his life as a medical curiosity and in 1826 made his way back to his Canadian home, but was persuaded to return to the care of Beaumont who by this time was in Wisconsin. St Martin, at Beaumont’s behest, was eventually enrolled as a sergeant in the US Army on a salary of twelve dollars a month, his only duty being to make himself available to Beaumont for his experiments. He became known amongst his fellow soldiers as ‘the man with the lid on his stomach’.26 This new status did not prevent St Martin from deserting on at least one occasion on account of the fact that his wife was homesick, but so great was the interest in his case that such eccentricities were tolerated and he was subjected to no disciplinary procedures.

His co-operation enabled Beaumont, in 1833, to publish Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion, containing the results of 240 experiments conducted on the famous stomach. It made the reputation of Beaumont as an authority on digestion. For centuries doctors had debated whether digestion was a chemical or physical process, an issue which was summarised, but not resolved, by the great English physician William Hunter when he wrote that ‘Some physiologists will have it that the stomach is a mill, others that it is a fermenting vat, others, again, that it is a stew pan. I say that it is a stomach’.27 Beaumont’s experiments resolved the matter.

William (1718–83) and John (1728–93) Hunter:William Hunter was born in Lanarkshire and worked with William Cullen before moving to Paris to study anatomy and surgery. In 1744 he set up a practice in surgery and midwifery in London but became better known as a lecturer on dissection, advertising his services by explaining that ‘Gentlemen may have the opportunity of learning the Art of Dissection during the whole winter season in the same manner as in Paris’ – that is to say by dissecting human corpses. In 1749 he moved with his brother John to Covent Garden and later to a specially equipped residence and anatomy theatre in Great Windmill Street nearby. He became physician extraordinary to Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, in 1762 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1767. A wealthy but reputedly miserly man, he enjoyed the friendship of David Hume, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett and assembled a collection of anatomical specimens which he left to form the Hunterian Collection in Glasgow. His younger brother John first assisted William in his work in London, not least by using his less exalted friends to obtain cadavers for William’s dissection classes. He became an army surgeon during the Seven Year War (1756–63) and bought an estate at Earl’s Court, in the countryside outside London, where he assembled a huge collection of animal skeletons, including cadavers from the royal menagerie. He became a surgeon at St George’s Hospital, then situated at Hyde Park Corner, where his first pupil was Edward Jenner, future discoverer of the process of vaccination. He was elected FRS a few months before William in 1767 and fell out with his brother in 1780 in a dispute over precedence in certain discoveries of the properties of the placenta. In 1769 he is believed deliberately to have infected himself with gonorrhoea in order to study the course of the disease. He was a friend of Joseph Banks, Captain James Cook and Joshua Reynolds and assembled a huge collection – 13,682 specimens – of natural history and comparative anatomy which he stored in his large mansion in Leicester Square and which formed the Hunterian Collection in London, much of which was destroyed by bombing in May 1941. He is commemorated by a statue in Leicester Square, near the site of his former home and by the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

In Experiments and Observations Beaumont described in some detail both the experiments he carried out and the fifty-one ‘inferences’ he had drawn from them over a period of about six years. They represented a significant advance on previous knowledge of the ways in which substances were converted from food to tissue and energy, and many of his conclusions, which led the science of nutrition in new directions, remain axioms. Thus he remarked that most reasonably well-to-do people, then as now, ate more than was good for them: ‘The system requires much less than is generally supplied to it … Dyspepsia is oftener the effect of over-eating and over-drinking than of any other cause’.28 A selection of his ‘inferences’ follows, numbered as Beaumont numbered them, in his own words and with his italics:

1.That animal and farinaceous elements are more easy of digestion than vegetable.

4.That the ultimate principles of aliment are always the same, from whatever food they may be obtained

8.That bulk as well as nutrient, is necessary to the articles of diet.

30.Pure gastric juice, when taken out of the stomach of a healthy adult … is a clear, transparent fluid; inodorous, a little saltish, and very perceptibly acid… an effectual solvent of the materia alimentaria … powerfully antiseptic, checking the putrefaction of meat. [This suggests that Beaumont had himself tasted the output of St Martin’s stomach.]

45.That the motions of the stomach produce a constant churning of its contents and admixture of food and gastric juices.

He supported the earlier hypothesis of the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani29, who had identified the role of gastric juices in the digestive system and added some comments on the process of ‘chymification’ by which food is converted into chyme, a liquefied substance that is passed from the stomach into the small intestine. There, enzymes from the pancreas, liver and gall bladder work with those of the small intestine itself to turn food into nutrients, which enter the circulatory system and pass thence to cells where they are used as energy, for repair or for growth. Beaumont stated, correctly, that ‘Chymification is effected in the stomach. It is the first stage, proper, of the conversion of aliment into blood’, though he could have added that it is converted into other things as well. Twentieth-century scientists like Sir Hans Krebs, referred to below, would develop these concepts further.

In the same year, 1833, that Experiments and Observations was published, St Martin returned to Canada and resisted all attempts by Beaumont and others to induce him to leave his family and co-operate with further experiments. These included a group of vegetarians in Boston who hoped to disprove Beaumont’s conclusion (inference 1) that meat was more easily digested than vegetables; and the prestigious Medical Society of London who offered him £300 to travel to London and show them his celebrated hole. The nearest he came to Europe was when a bottle of his gastric juices was sent to a Swedish chemist in 1834 but the five-month voyage, in the heat of summer, ensured that the sample was not analysed in time for the publication of Beaumont’s book.

Following Beaumont’s death in 1853 from a fall on icy steps, St Martin fell into the hands of an exhibitionist charlatan calling himself Dr Bunting (the doctorate awarded by Bunting himself) who took the human guinea pig on a freak show tour of eastern cities. Alexis St Martin died in Quebec in 1880 and his family refused all requests from scientists and doctors for the body to be made available for an autopsy and research. They even buried him at a greater depth than usual to deter ‘resurrectionists’ who might be tempted to disinter the body.

‘Count Rumford’ and Justus von Liebig

No account of the development of the science of nutrition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would be complete without some reference to the work of ‘Count Rumford’ and Justus von Liebig, though the latter’s work is covered in more detail in a later chapter. Count Rumford (1753–1814) was born Benjamin Thompson in Massachusetts where he showed an early interest in science which benefited from his marriage to a wealthy widow, leaving him leisure time to pursue his studies. He made good use of a quality described in his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography which records that, ‘Among Thompson’s many talents, the capacity to recommend himself to the mighty was prominent’.30 He became a major in the New Hampshire Militia but, being out of sympathy with the aims of the American Revolution, left for England where he entered government service and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work on explosives and heat. He was knighted in 1784 and from that year until 1795 he worked in the service of the Elector of Bavaria, who conferred on him the title Count von Rumford, taking his title from the small town of Rumford (now Concord), New Hampshire, where Thompson met his first wife. He invented the Rumford Stove, an effective means of cooking food either in the kitchen or on the field of battle, and the Rumford Fireplace, a thermally efficient means of heating a room and, while in the Elector’s service, made a contribution to the science of nutrition as a result of a misapprehension.

Rumford believed that water was itself a nutrient and that manure, rather than feeding plants itself, simply prepared water to perform its nutritious task.31 He reasoned that soup could fulfil the same role for humans, the solid content being the means by which the water was able to nourish the human body. He concentrated on creating a soup that was tasty and produced a recipe which contained ‘pearl barley, pease, potatoes, wheaten bread, vinegar, salt and water’ – again a nutritious meal similar to the ‘pottage’ later commended by Sir Jack Drummond and observed by Jonas Hanway.32 It was easily prepared and digested by the Elector’s soldiers and the Elector’s poorer subjects.33 Rumford later married the widow of Antoine Lavoisier,34 his own wife, whom he had abandoned in America, and he founded the Royal Institution in partnership with Sir Joseph Banks, appointing Humphrey Davy as its first lecturer.

In 1837 the British Association asked the eminent German professor Justus Von Liebig (1803–73) ‘to prepare a Report on the present state of our knowledge in regard to Isomeric Bodies’,35 a rather convoluted way of asking Liebig to explain the chemistry of agricultural production. This Liebig was well qualified to do since he was the world’s leading authority on the application of science to agriculture from his base at the university now named after him at Giessen, Hesse. The result of his enquiry was the seminal work, Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, which explained how crops drew carbon dioxide from the air and nitrogen from the roots and turned both into nutrients, an analysis which has stood the test of time. Liebig was an entrepreneur as well as a professor. In 1865 he formed the Liebig Extract of Meat Company operating from Fray Bentos in Uruguay. The product had a curious origin. Liebig was friendly with the distinguished English chemist and industrialist James Muspratt (1793–1886), whose chemical business eventually became Imperial Chemical Industries. Muspratt’s daughter stayed with Liebig in Munich when she was seventeen and became ill with scarlet fever. Alarmed, Liebig minced some chicken, heated it in water and pressed the juice from the chicken for feeding to the stricken girl. Her weakened appetite and digestion were able to absorb the readily digestible nutrients and she made a quick recovery.36 The extract was later adopted by hospitals in Munich. The beef product from Fray Bentos involved removing fat, sinew and bone from meat, chopping up the remainder into a pulp and heating it in water for thirty minutes. Following this, any remaining fat was removed and the remaining extract was cut into cubes of which it was claimed that ‘1lb of extract of meat contains the soluble elements of 30 to 32lb of lean fresh beef’ and further that ‘if boiled with a few slices of bread, potatoes and a little salt, is sufficient to make broth for 120 men [i.e. soldiers] in the field’.37