Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth Century French Literature and Medicine

Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine offers a new way of conceptualizing food in literature: not as social or cultural symbol but as an agent within a network of relationships between body and mind and between humans and environment. By analysing gastrointestinal health in medical, literary, and philosophical texts, this volume rethinks the intersections between literature and health in the nineteenth century and triggers new debates about France’s relationship with food. Of relevance to scholars of literature and to historians and sociologists of science, food, and medicine, it will provide ideal reading for students of French Literature and Culture, History, Cultural Studies, and History of Science and Medicine, Literature and Science, Food Studies, and the Medical Humanities. Readers will be introduced to new ways of approaching digestion in this period and will gain appreciation of the powerful resources offered by nineteenth-century French writing in understanding the nature of connections between gut, mind, and environment and the impact of these connections on our status as human beings.

Shortlisted for the 2025 R. Gapper Book Prize (The Society for French Studies)

Manon Mathias is Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow. Her research examines interactions between literature, science, and medicine in nineteenth-century France. She co-edited Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and is the author of Vision in the Novels of George Sand (Oxford University Press, 2016).