Chapter 3 explores the systematic observation and experimental manipulation of animal eating that got underway in eighteenth-century natural history and physiology. Naturalists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon and Lazzaro Spallanzani sought insights into human appetite and eating by studying ingestion and digestion in animals, posing questions about differences and similarities in human and animal eating and about the relative significance of learning and instinct in ingestive patterns and habits. Physiologists concentrated on ingestive and digestive processes in human beings, distinguishing appetite as desire from hunger as need. Competing physiological theories reflected broad divisions between mechanists like Albrecht von Haller, who sought specific structures and somatic causes of appetite, eating, and digestion, and vitalists such as those of the Montpellier school, who regarded these phenomena as the work of an over-arching principle of life or specific vital forces. While mechanists focused on bodily movements they saw as responsible for hunger, vitalists regarded deep-seated organismic desires as the essential determinants of vital action. As experimental methods gained in prestige, the search for concrete mechanisms of ingestion and digestion rendered the role of appetite problematic.

Abstract Chapter 7 examines efforts to explain the drive to eat in nutritional physiology from 1850-1900, decades when leading physiologists sought a materialist understanding of ingestion and digestion. Such researchers insisted on the indispensability of laboratory methods and discounted psychic factors observed by physicians in human patients. Key figures in this chapter include Jacob Moleschott, who applied the new concept of metabolism to appetite yet accepted the traditional view that appetite supplied the surest guide to eating; Carl Ludwig, who insisted on the need for objective, quantitative analysis of nutritional processes and trained a generation of students in the requisite methods; Claude Bernard, who established a lastingly influential framework for the investigation of appetite with his doctrine of self-regulation of the “internal milieu”; and Moritz Schiff, who argued against localist theories of the urge to eat focused on the stomach and acknowledged the role of psychic factors. Despite the promise of a materialist approach, the persistence of basic questions about the urge to eat encouraged the emergence of competing camps of peripheralists and cerebralists and, eventually, of a new physiological psychology that claimed authority over eating desires and behavior.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsClaude Blanckaert. De la race à l'évolution: Paul Broca et l'anthropologie française (1850–1900). (Histoire des Sciences Humaines.) 616 pp., table, bibl., index. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009. $56.55 (cloth).Elizabeth A. WilliamsElizabeth A. Williams Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 102, Number 1March 2011 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/660238 Views: 50Total views on this site © 2011 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

G. A. Lindeboom, who died in 1986, was a renowned exemplar of that increasingly rare breed, the practicing physician and humanist scholar. In the course of a fifty-year career, he worked as an internist-radiologist, professor of the medical faculty of the Free University (Amsterdam), and medical historian. According to the editor of this volume, M. J. Van Lieburg, Lindeboom produced “nearly 300 medical-historical writings, around fifty of which are monographs” (xviii). Of these works, Lindeboom's biography of the famed early modern physician and chemist Herman Booerhaave has undoubtedly been the most widely known and influential. This new edition of the Boerhaave biography is intended as a monument to Lindeboom's contributions to medicine in the capacities of clinician, professor, and historian. Lavishly produced, on high-quality glossy paper and embellished with a bookmark ribbon, it is a tribute both to the biographer and to Boerhaave, regarded by Lindeboom as the greatest Dutch physician and, so van Lieburg observes, “the ideal medical man” (xix).

This study examines whether college students' participation in diversity-related experiences instills motivation to take actions for a diverse democracy. Results suggest that interactions with diverse peers, participation in diversity-related courses, and activities inside and outside residence halls inspire students to challenge their own prejudices and promote inclusion and social justice.