Elsa Richardson is an academic at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She holds a Chancellor’s Fellowship in the History of Health and Wellbeing at the Center for the Social History of Health and Healthcare. She was recently named one of BBC Radio 3’s AHRC New Generation Thinkers.
What’s the big idea?
One of the great frontiers of modern science hides within each of us: the human gut. Biomedicine is revisiting many ancient questions and suspicions regarding the connection of our gastrointestinal system to our minds. Folklore and science collide as we seek to understand the biological and cultural significance of this most fascinating organ.
Below, Elsa shares five key insights from her new book, Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut: The Secret Story of the Body’s Most Fascinating Organ. Listen to the audio version—read by Elsa herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. The gut-brain connection is nothing new.
Over the last decade or so, scientists have been exploring the belly’s curiously intimate relationship with the mind. They have found that the two communicate through several channels: the immune system, the vagus nerve that controls heart rate and digestion, the tryptophan metabolism, which is associated with aging and inflammation, and the enteric nervous system that governs gastrointestinal behavior. Most remarkable, perhaps, is the revelation that the gut can, in a sense, think for itself. There are 100 million neurons lodged in your alimentary canal, and these can operate independently from the central nervous system—a quality that has led some experts to describe the gut as our second brain.
The idea that the belly might have some part to play in the life of the mind is far from novel. Not only has the stomach long been characterized as the true source of our emotions, but it has also been hailed as a peculiarly intelligent organ. Galen, one of the most acclaimed physicians of the ancient world, thought the gut could act independently from the brain because it registers its own emptiness. He wrote that nature granted the stomach the ability to feel a lack, which rouses the animal to seek food. The growling demands of an empty belly served as Galen’s proof that the stomach possessed a visceral intelligence.
This understanding of the gut sustained a much broader theory of the body debated through antiquity, allowing for the possibility that thinking might take place at various sites around the body. Today, biomedicine is beginning to ask the same kind of questions.
2. The gut and the brain have not always been on friendly terms.
We tend to imagine the union of mind and belly as a largely amiable one, but it has a far more troubled history. Ancient philosophers were deeply suspicions of this connection. Plato, for instance, held our guts responsible for baser instincts, which the brain and heart were tasked with keeping in check. Later, medieval doctors warned that poisonous vapors fermenting in the depths of the bowel could cause madness. 18th-century physicians held poor digestion responsible for the notoriously melancholic temperament of the English, and well into the 19th century, the gut was routinely characterized as a sort of bad temper. As one doctor declared, it was “a strangely wicked and ungrateful organ […] implacably opposed to man’s progress and comfort.” We now imagine that listening to our guts might help us manage our mental health, but throughout history, the belly has been more often viewed as a cause of emotional turmoil, foul moods, nightmares, and so on.
“Throughout history, the belly has been more often viewed as a cause of emotional turmoil.”
Indeed, the gut seems to have been a troublemaker for most of history. Early medical authorities established a hierarchy of the body that placed the rational head at the top, followed by the virtuous heart, and then down to the base intestines. Good health required the stomach to know its place, but it was widely held that it had something of an attitude problem. A physician writing in the middle of the 18th century warned that spasms of the lower belly could impair the “Force of the Memory and the Brightness of the Genius.” In 1852, a doctor called James Eyre noted that though the gut ought to be “invaluable as a slave,” it was often “a dangerous and too powerful Despot.” Despite its lowly position in the corporeal pecking order, the messy viscera of the digestive system wielded power over the most elevated parts, interrupting important work of the brain and infecting the mind with dark moods.
3. The belly was once thought to have prophetic powers.
For instance, in medieval Britain, it was possible to consult the services of a gastromancer, a kind of fortune teller who would listen to the gurgles and splutters of the stomach for news of tragic deaths, events, and unexpected visitors. It was advisable to treat the language of the belly with caution as it was not always clear who or what was speaking. A talkative gut could be evidence of demonic possession. Demons love to hide out in the belly, or as the 16th-century witchfinder Nicholas Remy had it, “very often the devil has his dwelling in those parts, which like the bilge of a ship, receive the filth and excrements of the body.” Accused witches were often described as having bloated stomachs, evidence of the supernatural entities that lurked within. A site of dirt and corruption, located far from the higher faculties of the heart and mind, the bowels were where dark forces made their home in the body.
Despite sometimes being associated with witches, gastromancy remained part of medical practice well into the 18th century. Doctors would listen carefully to the gurgles and splashes of the belly to identify illnesses in the body. Even today, the ear remains a key tool in diagnosing many gastric conditions, a legacy that perhaps points to how our modern understandings of the gut owe some debt to centuries of magical and folkloric thinking.
4. The gut is gendered.
In the medieval period, swollen bellies were more readily associated with pregnancy than demonic possession, and there are linguistic overlaps between womb and gut. The Latin term venter was used well into the 16th century to refer to both. This slippage in the distinction between gestation and digestion revealed something of how gendered the gut has been.
In the early part of the 20th century, a popular laxative called Bile Beans marketed itself exclusively to women. Not only was the female physiology supposedly more predisposed to constipation, but sluggish bowels were considered a threat to the successful performance of femininity. Inattention to digestion might—adverts for Bile Beans warned—lead to a thick waist and dull complexion, jeopardizing marriage prospects and forcing women to adopt unattractive “mannish” ways to compensate. While it is no surprise to find women in history judged on their appearance and warned that their future happiness depended upon good looks, it is significant to see that the movements of the digestive tract were so implicated in this familiar cultural narrative.
“Modern understandings of the gut owe some debt to centuries of magical and folkloric thinking.”
The gut has also been gendered as male and, at times, been perceived as a site of masculine energy. To be tough-spirited and courageous is to “go with your gut” or “follow a gut feeling.” To act in a way that “takes guts” is to demonstrate a certain strength of character. Around 1914, John Wilce, a professor of clinical medicine at Ohio State University, coined another term for this manly inner resolve: intestinal fortitude. While traveling back to his office after coaching the college football team, his thoughts of sport mingled with the physiology lecture he was about to deliver, bringing the new expression to mind. This expression, intestinal fortitude, caught on quickly and soon took on particular resonance as young men were called upon to fight in the First World War. Even today, the Oxford English Dictionary illustrates the use of the colloquialism “to have guts” with examples that refer only to men, suggesting that this link between bellies and courage remains almost exclusively masculine.
5. The gut is key to individual and collective identity.
This unruly organ can tell us a lot about ourselves. We still tend to conflate identity with mind, but it’s clear that digestive processes, consumption, absorption, and defecation also play an important role in shaping our sense of self. Digestion involves a mediation between the interior and outside world. To eat is to bring something from the exterior into the deepest recesses of the body. According to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, what we choose to eat is governed by our conception of symbolic pollution, in the same way that “dirt” is, in her terms, “matter out of place.” So, too, are our food choices informed by culturally established boundaries between clean and unclean, safe and unsafe, self and other.
The work of the gut is thus implicated in all kinds of complicated debates around subjectivity, technology, sexuality, spirituality, nationhood, and identity. We should listen to our guts to learn more about ourselves, but also to better understand the world.
To listen to the audio version read by author Elsa Richardson, download the Next Big Idea App today:
