HIST 410: Readings and Assignments

Mon 6/30: Introductions, SLOs, Key Concepts

Welcome! Today we’re just getting up to speed with course logistics. There are a couple things to do just to make sure erverything is wired up for our month together. Please do them ASAP, but make sure these are done BEFORE WEDNESDAY. Normally stuff is due the day it appears on the syllabus, but we can take an extra day to get up to speed.

Tue 7/1: Understanding Nutrition

  • Jessica J. Mudry, Measured Meals. Nutrition in America, 1-19 (Introduction: Eating by Numbers).

This chapter discusses the quantificaiton of dietary advice and the implications of such a change, which we dive into in week 3. The reason we start with it is because she calls direct attention to “the rhetoric of science”. Her point is talking about diet is never just about the “facts”—if there even is such a thing (and there isn’t)—but also about how they are discussed. Language itself is not just a reporter of knowedlge, but a direct shaper of it.

Her focus is on the language of quantification, but it can help us think about HOW WE TALK ABOUT HEALTH AND DIET. I want to set up this drame of analysis so we can be thinking about rhetoric of diet and health as we move through the course (even if the first few weeks don’t have anything about quantification).

Wed 7/2: Classical Diet

Today we cover medical and dietary thinking from ancient Greece and Rome. Some of the medical thinking seems a bit bizarre to our modern sensibilities, but in terms of dietary advice, there is a remarkable consistency over the last 2000 years.

  • Classical medicine video
  • Mark Grant, Galen: On Food and Diet, 1-8. These few pages provide a general introduction to the classical physician Galen (died circa 215 CE) and ancient medicine. The author of the introduction (Grant) has translated many of Galen’s writing about food, and we’ll read an excerpt from those as noted below.
  • Galen, (tr. Mark Grant), On the Humors, 14-18; On the Power of Foods, 68-84. This was written by Galen himself (not Grant).Note that there is WAY MORE DETAIL about foods in here than you need to know. Read for the big picture in terms of how Galen establishes his expertise, what topics are most interesting to him, how he thinks about the relationship between diet and health.

Thu 7/3: Medieval Medicine Premodern diet

We explore the contours of medieval medicine, providing important context for understanding the long history of diet and health advice. While this course focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s crucial to recognize that physicians have been debating what constitutes healthy food and good nutrition for a very long time. This week’s lectures establish the foundation of the Western medical tradition as it pertains to diet, and helps us understand the close coupling between diet and culture.

  • Visualizing Premodern Medicine (link TBP)
  • SKIM: Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 63–77; 78–84; 91–104.

Fri: July 4 Holiday

Week 2: 18th and 19th centuries

The theme for next few days is how physicians beginning the 1700s started promoting dietary advice and their expertise in different ways than they did previously. We also see the early ties between dietary advice, moral authority, a common sense, a constellation of ideas we’ll come back to repeatedly in very different historical contexts.

Mon 7/7: Dietary Expertise in the Enlightenment

  • Steven Shapin, “Trusting George Cheyne,” 263–97. This article is clear and informative, but way longer than it needs with too much detail. (yay academic writing!) So, let’s use AI to help us sort it out. And help us learn how to use AI. Take the PDF from Zotero and upload it into some AI tool (chatGPT, for instance, but it doesn’t matter which one), and ask for a summary of the article.

You’ll find it’s actually not bad. But it’s still REALLY reductive (meaning it misses a lot). Your job is to skim the Shapin article for yourself and compare the impression you get from the actual text (even if skimming) compared to the AI summary.

Tue 7/8: Cheyne himself

  • George Cheyne, An Essay on Regimen,” i-xxiv, and randomly sample the whole text to get a feel for the tone, language, and rhetorical effect. Note that a single “s” within a word looks like an “f”. For instance, on title page you’ll see “Philofophical” instead of “Philosophical”. Yes, the long “f”s and the language in general seems weird to us moderns, but you get used to it after a few pages.

Wed 7/9: Natural and Moral Diets of the 1800s

The dietary advice we just read was directed primarily toward the upper classes. By the early 1800s, however, dietary advice was increasingly directed at the emerging middle class. Physicians and moral reformers saw diets changing as a result of industrialization and urbanization as a distinct societal ill.

Over the next few days we look at how moral and dietary advice became even more tightly coupled throughout the 1800s. Later in the course, we’ll see how that link has persisted through today.

Thu 7/10: Healthy Living with Crackers

  • Adam D. Shprintzen, The Vegetarian Crusade, Chapter 1: Proto-vegetarianism, skim 10–mid 16; 16-27; 32-38. This chapter briefly describes some early religious sentiments supporting vegetarianism, and most importantly introduces Sylvester Graham and his historical context. Focus on Graham, not the Biblical Christians, but understand their general influence.

Fri 7/11: Graham himself

Week 3: Scientific and Quantified Eating

There has been no bigger shift in dietary advice than starting to understand health in terms of numbers, averages, and scales. This week examines some of the earliest developments in quantification of dietary knowledge and advice. We confront the implications of this paradigm shift each day as we see nutritional information labels, and watch-like computers that count our steps each day.

Mon 7/14: Quantifying diets

  • Jessica Mudry, “Quantifying an American Eater” Food, Culture & Society 9.1 (2006): 49–67.

Tue 7/15: Diet and Morality

  • Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America, Chapter 2: Scientific Moralization, 13–44.

Wed 7/16: The Birth of the Calorie

  • Wilbur O. Atwater, “The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition: The Composition of Our Bodies and Our Food,” Century Illustrated Magazine, 34 (May 1887): 59–74.

Thu — Fri (7/17 - 7/18): Early 20th century sources

These two days we focus on a few diet books written between 1918 and 1922. They are all COMPLETELY different in their approach, style, and the way their authors try to establish their expertise.

Our goal is to understand how the same cultural context could yield such different texts and how they collectively illustrate several important facets of the history of diet/health/nutrition around the time they were written.

For each text, I’ve indicated specific pages you should read fairly carefully. IN ADDITION, carefully examine the table of contents and randomly sample pages or small sections throughout the book to get a feel for the text as a whole—like what is and what isn’t addressed in the text.

Week 4: The fat and malnourished body

Fat gets a bad rap. Why is this? We’ve looked at the morality of dietary advice in several ways already, and one aspect that has persisted is the idea that a large body represents a moral deficiency. This week examines how the idea of fat and fat bodies became something to avoid during the early 20th century and how the legacy of vitamins and micronutrients came to define “proper” nourishment and bodily.

Mon 7/21

  • Helen Zoe Veit, Modern Food, Moral Food, Chapter 7: The Triumph of the Will: The Progressive Body and the Thin Ideal, 157–80.

Tue 7/22

A. F. La Berge, “How the Ideology of Low Fat Conquered America,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 63.2 (2007): 139–77. If you’re interested in the popular discourse of low-fat diets (mostly 1970+, but with some earlier history, too), it’s got a lot of great information and shows how popular diet advice columns (like Jane Brody’s in the New York Times) become sources in which both outdated and cutting-edge nutritional research mingle together.

Wed 7/23

Thu 7/24

Dietary villains: gluten, lectins, fodmops

Fri 7/25

How can we really evaluate whether any diet could be useful? Is there a “right” diet that we just haven’t found? Have we known it all along?

This chapter is about EVALUATING dietary advice and dietary CRITIQUE. As you know from its overall goals, this course is all about learning to think critically about dietary advice and expertise in general, using history to gain a broader perspective. Today we turn our attention from evaluating the rhetoric of dietary advice to evaluating the rhetoric of dietary critique.

Week 5: Review and Reflection

Mon 7/28

Tue 7/29

Post your final course reflection.