Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)There are very few books on the history of our cultural obsession with weight and/or with "weight bigotry" in the U.S. When did it start? Why? How did it get so vehement? So an attempt at perspective is definitely welcome.
Stearns reports that before the 1890s, plumpness was preferred, and signals began to change only as fashions, fat-control devices, and increased public comment on fat began to emerge in the decade prior to 1900.
After that, the trend grew and intensified over an entire century. Stearns sees this growing obsession as a "compensation" for our indulgence in other pleasures about which we are ambivalent--consumerism, sex, women's freedom. As long as we demonstrate strict discipline about our body size as a kind of puritanical guilt-laden compensation, we can allow ourselves these other indulgent, consumerist pleasures.

Stearns likens the vehemence of fat hatred to Calvinism: only the elect (thin) are "saved," glorified through "salvation" stories of heroic weight loss, and rewarded with welcome entry to the cultural pleasures now available. Those who fail or refuse to measure up to the strict standards of slenderness are punished by being relegated to "fat hell" where open season--in the form of attacks and endless analyses of moral failings, character flaws, and psychological weaknesses--is allowed, imprisoning the recalcitrants in the consequences of their supposedly deplorable lack of self-discipline. Clothes, love, and the good life are not to be theirs.
By way of contrast, the French, who have equally strict standards of slenderness, are committed not to compensation for other pleasures but to high aesthetic standards of beauty. In France, fat is not an indication of moral or psychological weakness but is simply an offense against beauty--fat is just ugly. Divergence from the norm is not considered blameworthy but is assumed to be remedied fairly easily with a little restraint and maybe some reducing creams. With a little work, no one *need* be ugly. It is, therefore, the personal responsibility of each individual to make those moderate efforts and meet the beauty standards amidst an environment of reminders and encouragement.
The result? Both patterns are oppressive, unrelenting, and rigid, but the French are 14 pounds lighter on average and weight in France has been declining rather than increasing.
Stearns does not see that historical French patterns or approaches can be adopted in the U.S. However, he notes that merely recognizing another, different pattern opens the door for reconsideration of U.S. attitudes. Those attitudes were shaped over a century; they can also be reshaped.
Stearns believes that we place too much responsibility on individuals for what are, essentially, social issues. To require everyone to immerse themselves in personal battles against weight while indulgence and excess in all other areas remains unaddressed in the public arena seems not only unfair but unbalanced. Basically, Stearns hopes we will lighten up a little on individual weight issues and look more seriously at larger cultural indulgences.
Simply for the effort to bring historical perspective to the issue, the book gets four stars. But it is sometimes a frustrating read. It is fraught with equivocations and reminders that many factors are at play, all of which preclude crispness. It is not until the very end that clarity begins to emerge from the discussion.
And finally, it describes the scene without benefit of factors that could, conceivably, change all the rules and the analysis as it relates to new trends. If, as research is increasingly showing, fat and related major diseases are common in cultures based on animal-based diets and uncommon in cultures based on plant-based diets, the emphasis shifts from "how much" one is eating to "what" one is eating; from "restraint" to "plenty" without weight gain.
Such a major shift in our understanding of food, nutrition, disease, body weight, and nutrition medicine would shift blame from individuals to a diet that we thought served us but in fact did not. This would chart a very different course--and analysis--for the new century.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West

Click here for more information about Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West

Read More...

Cultures of Plague: Medical Thought at the End of the Renaissance Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The Black Death struck Europe in the fourteenth century, killing hundreds of millions of people. There was little understanding of even the most basic causes and effects that might have been involved in the spread of the disease. It is not true, however, that the scientific insights about disease that were to start in the Enlightenment and continue to our own times represented the first understanding of the plague as something other than a magical curse or a lesson from God. In Italy, the plague recurred in an epidemic from 1575 to 1578, and during this particular outbreak, people began some primitive but essential epidemiology and even societal treatment. This is the surprising lesson of _Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance_ (Oxford University Press) by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., an astonishingly detailed look at the beginnings of an intellectual revolution. The author, a specialist in the Italian Renaissance and in the history of disease, reminds us that there was "no simple binary progression from a supposed premodern to modern medical thought." The doctors, medical workers, and even gatekeepers in the middle of the plague in Milan, Padua, and Venice observed, looked at the illness in new ways, and wrote about what they saw.
The writings are essential to Cohn's study, and represent a basic shift in the way the plague was documented. Barber-surgeons might write about the plague, and drug-sellers, merchants, lawyers, artisans, clerics, and minor officials all got into the act, a printed resource which Cohn has mined as the bibliographical backbone of his book, "a wide spectrum of authors from cardinals to cobblers, in prose and verse." The tracts from this time were not just in academic Latin but in the vernacular. Now doctors had a new confidence, and it was gained in part by disregarding ancient teachings. Experience and even experimentation began to be stressed. It seems like a small step, but doctors began documenting that mortality was occurring within households, getting an idea of the concept of contagion and disease transmitted from one person to another rather than being "miasmic," transmitted by air that was somehow bad. There were attempts to explain why the poor were disproportionately affected. One author wrote that plague struck the lower classes because they were "forced to eat bad and corrupt food, stinky bread, grass, and unknown roots". The poor could not count upon clean water; polluted water began to be recognized as a cause of disease. The poor lived in filth; there was lack of plumbing in their houses, buckets of excrement were kept under the beds, the windows (if any) were sealed, and dirt accumulated. Seeing the social effects of the plague in this new way resulted in new ways of treatment. "To judge from their published treatises," writes Cohn, "the crisis of 1575 fundamentally altered doctors' approach to and thinking about plagues from the individual patient to the community." The causes of plague were social, so the solutions had to be political. Recommendations were made about how the cities ought to issue decrees about administering the sick, building new hospitals, enacting quarantines, cleaning the streets, executing those who dealt in infected goods, and other public measures. At least some of these decrees were put into action, and in addition, charity to improve the lot of the poor was enforced. There was a place for religious processions and other ceremonies, but secular governments were in charge of making practical changes. The point of view developed in this outbreak attributed any triumph over disease to rulers and civil servants, the subjects of many subsequent literary celebrations.
Of course the doctors and citizens had no real knowledge of the disease roles of rats, fleas, and _Yersinia pestis_, but the capacity to look at clinical evidence without the burden of forcing it into ancient medical theories did enable some important changes, and was a foundation for better understanding as the centuries went on. Cohn, in an erudite and beautifully organized book, has cited a multitude of tracts, and quoted many of them here to show the beginnings of these initial ideas about how governments should involve themselves in the administration of health procedures for their citizens. Four centuries later, we are still trying to answer the same question for our own times.


Click Here to see more reviews about: Cultures of Plague: Medical Thought at the End of the Renaissance

Cultures of Plague opens a new chapter in the history of medicine. Neither the plague nor the ideas it stimulated were static, fixed in a timeless Galenic vacuum over five centuries, as historians and scientists commonly assume. As plague evolved in its pathology, modes of transmission, and the social characteristics of its victims, so too did medical thinking about plague develop. This study of plague imprints from academic medical treatises to plague poetry highlights the most feared and devastating epidemic of the sixteenth-century, one that threatened Italy top to toe from 1575 to 1578 and unleashed an avalanche of plague writing. From erudite definitions, remote causes, cures and recipes, physicians now directed their plague writings to the prince and discovered their most 'valiant remedies' in public health: strict segregation of the healthy and ill, cleaning streets and latrines, addressing the long-term causes of plague-poverty. Those outside the medical profession joined the chorus. In the heartland of Counter-Reformation Italy, physicians along with those outside the profession questioned the foundations of Galenic and Renaissance medicine, even the role of God. Assaults on medieval and Renaissance medicine did not need to await the Protestant-Paracelsian alliance of seventeenth-century in northern Europe. Instead, creative forces planted by the pandemic of 1575-8 sowed seeds of doubt and unveiled new concerns and ideas within that supposedly most conservative form of medical writing, the plague tract. Relying on health board statistics and dramatized with eyewitness descriptions of bizarre happenings, human misery, and suffering, these writers created the structure for plague classics of the eighteenth century, and by tracking the contagion's complex and crooked paths, they anticipated trends of nineteenth-century epidemiology.

Get 14% OFF

Click here for more information about Cultures of Plague: Medical Thought at the End of the Renaissance

Read More...