The gut feelings of medical culture

There is no doubt that the idea of gut health having systemic effects on human physiology is an ancient one, as countless health enthusiasts today pronounce with reference to supposed quotations from Hippocrates. But in the nineteenth century, a critical mass of doctors, psychiatrists, novelists, artists, ethnographers, politicians, and religious leaders all began to consider that digestive function principally enfluenced both emotion and cognition, often dynamically engaging with such ideas across wide disciplinary divides. Such reflections on the relationship between the digestive system and the mind spread far beyond medical journals and clinical practices, representative of the new popular enthusiasm for scientific thought in nineteenth-century cultures, which resulted in a broad range of genres through which evocation of the gut was imaginatively expressed.