Flesh in the Age of Reason (36 page)

From the Greeks onwards, doctors had systematized all the items of vital importance to healthy living and dubbed them collectively the ‘non-naturals’. There were said to be six in all, thus tabulated by the fashionable Bath physician George Cheyne: ‘1. The Air we breathe in. 2. Our Meat and Drink. 3. Our Sleep and Watching. 4. Our Exercise and Rest. 5. Our Evacuations and their Obstructions. 6. The Passions of our Minds.’

One of the prime reasons why people diarized so religiously was to keep track of physical routines, with a view, if necessary – as all too often! – to shaming themselves into mending their ways. It was
possibly with an eye to health that a few diarists – Robert Hooke for example – also recorded their orgasms and other sexual activities, often indicated by a cryptic symbol. Best theory had it that too much and too little sex were equally debilitating, though ideas about what frequency was ideal differed. Increasing numbers – like the
Spectator
’s hypochondriac – weighed themselves regularly, even though this frequently makes sorry reading, for it was commonly, as with Sir Joseph Banks, his wife and his sister Sophia, a tale of gravitation to obesity – by 1794, Sophia was fourteen and a half stone, and her brother far heavier: no wonder his gout worsened. When John Baker depressed the scales in 1772, he admitted ‘I was then extremely fat and weighed above 15 stone, I think, 10 pounds’. According to Thomas Short, physician and attentive social observer, writing in 1727, it was an age of eating: ‘I believe’, he asserted, ‘no Age did ever afford more Instances of Corpulency than our own.’ England was becoming a nation of fatties.

Health freaks and worriers made free in their advice to others as to how to protect it. ‘My deare Ned,’ Lady Brilliana Harley cautioned her son, ‘be carefull of yourself, and forget not. Doo exersise; for health can no more be had without it, then without a good diet.’ Among the non-naturals exercise went with moderation: ‘Be temperate in all things in your diet,’ William Penn admonished his children, ‘for that is physic by prevention.’ ‘Exercise and application’, Thomas Jefferson told his daughter, ‘produce order in our affairs, health of body and cheerfulness of mind.’ The pursuit of health thus required the same sort of eternal vigilance as did maintenance of the purity of the soul.

The classic give-away sign of a vitiated constitution lay in wasting. The flesh fell off the old – the chief image of the elderly was a withered state, all skin and bones. The flesh might also waste among the young, however. Teenaged girls suffering from what was known as the ‘green sickness’ or chlorosis wasted away, it was often said out of frustrated sexual longing (marriage was the remedy). The parallel to such a maid was the male adolescent who declined, allegedly as a consequence of ‘self-abuse’ – eighteenth-century physiology taught
that the vital fluid which was the flame of life dwelt in the semen. Seminal loss consequent upon compulsive masturbation was regarded as peculiarly depletive. A youth who ‘was observ’d to Man-strupate very often’ shortly ‘died of a deep Consumption, having lived till he became like a Ghost, or living Skeleton’, reported
Onania
, the most popular of a multitude of sensationalist warnings. James Graham, the vocal sexual pioneer of the 1780s, dubbed such self-abusers ‘poor creeping tremulous, pale, spindle-shanked wretched creatures who crawl upon the earth, spirting, dribling, and drawing off, alone’.

Thus associated with weakness, physical and moral, thinness was also derided because it was the mark of penury. Stoutness, by contrast, was esteemed as the mark of the wealthy: there was no honour in poverty, but amplitude was appreciated. Portraits of the Restoration and Augustan eras show Englishmen proud to display a good
embonpoint
or an ample corporation, while fleshiness in females was suggestive of allure and fertility.

Such ingrained preferences for the fat over the thin were also reinforced by patriotic prejudice. Cartoon caricatures took comic pride in the ever corpulent John Bull, in sharp contrast to the onion-nibbling, starveling French peasant, a bag of bones, or the effete, effeminized Versailles courtier, dolled up in the latest foppish fashions but, insect-like, without an ounce of flesh, signifying a lack of virility.

Traditional wisdom maintained that this healthy constitutional stoutness and strength were upheld by a hearty appetite, especially for red meat. The Englishman’s proverbial love of roast beef was thus not mere patriotism, gluttony or fantasy, but positively therapeutic. Energetic trenchermanship was a prudent form of preventive medicine. ‘He that does not mind his belly will mind nothing,’ ran Samuel Johnson’s dictum, perhaps hinting at the old proverb, ‘The belly carries the legs and not the legs the belly.’ Designated by Edward Jenner the ‘grand Monarque of the Constitution’, the stomach needed to be active and toned up so as to digest the copious amount of food required to concoct the blood, spirits and humours which
animated the limbs. Hence the preferred victuals were strong and savoury, and the beef, beer and burgundy diet of the rich was evidently more invigorating than the insipid gruel and water of the poor. ‘My Stomach brave today,’ purred Parson Woodforde in 1795, ‘relished my dinner.’ Rarely a day went by without his logging what he ate. Indeed, his ultimate diary entry before his death culminates with a last supper: ‘Very weak this Morning, scarce able to put on my Cloaths and with great difficulty, get down Stairs with help… Dinner to day, Rost Beef etc.’ John Locke was equivocally informed by a correspondent that his wife, ‘in order to her health [
sic
]… is enterd into a course of gluttony, for shee is never well but when shee is eating’.

This model of the healthy body as a vital economy, demanding energetic and regular replenishment of stimulus, was widely accepted by the medical profession itself, culminating in the controversial Edinburgh medical theorist John Brown, who stressed that life itself was a ‘forced state’, maintained only by external stimulus (see below,
Chapter 21
). Dr Thomas Trotter endorsed the advice of the Venetian longevist Luigi Cornaro who prescribed two cordial glasses of wine a day for those aged 40, four at 50, and six at 60 – proof that the much-prized moderation in no way implied abstinence – while Dr Peter Shaw wrote a book in 1724 to prove
Wine Preferable to Water
, indeed
A Grand Preserver of Health
. Alcohol was perhaps the prime item in the entire
materia medica
. For long Parson Woodforde swigged a medicinal glass of port as ‘a strengthening Cordial twice a day’

Hearty eating and drinking in turn required equally energetic waste disposal. Constipation with its putrefying excrements and indurated faeces would, all agreed, produce gastric ferments, flatulence and bile, leading, many feared, to intestinal poisoning. Hence the popular physiology of the non-naturals attended to evacuations no less than to appetites. Purging with laxatives was the panacea, but sweats, emetics and blood-letting were important auxiliaries.

An entrenched medical materialism thus pictured the pulsating body as a through-put economy; its well-tuned functioning depended upon generous input and unimpeded outflow. Circulation was the
key, as with the economy at large; stagnation was an evil. This need for positive stimulus had to be squared, however, with other age-old doctrines – both medical and religio-moral – of temperance, moderation and the golden mean. Might not the drive to tank up the system sanction greed and so precipitate pathological excess? ‘I verily beleeve [Dr Baines] will kill himself ere long by his intemperance,’ lamented Anne Lady Conway, a close friend of the Cambridge Platonists and hence one disposed to beware the snares of carnal appetites. Similar fears were often expressed in reaction to what an early Georgian pamphlet denounced as ‘the present luxurious and fantastical manner of Eating’. Notorious for such indigestible favourites as pudding, the English were, as the saying went, digging their graves with their teeth. ‘Purging and vomiting almost the whole day,’ lamented Parson Woodforde on 18 July 1786, ‘I believe I made too free Yesterday with Currant Tarts and Cream &c.’

It was a common tale, even down to the ominous ‘etcetera’. John Carrington learnt the hard way when his love of ‘Butock of beef’ destroyed first his stomach and then his health. At one dinner, his diary reveals, he pigged himself with ‘Roasted hear & a hasht hear & boyled Sholdr of Motton & onions, puding etc.… Plenty of punch & good company’, but justice proved summary: ‘Theese fine made dishes did not agree with me, purged me very much all next day, I am for plane food.’ Too late, however! Over the next few months, entry after entry reads ‘canot eate nor drink’, ‘no stomake to eat’, and so forth. His constitution was destroyed; decay set in, and he died.

If serious eating was parlous, gross drinking proved still more constitutionally destructive. Erasmus Darwin dubbed alcohol ‘the greatest curse of the Christian world’; and no wonder, for oceans were swallowed, and not just during the gin craze. Sylas Neville recorded bottle days while a medical student in Edinburgh: ‘Sun. Sep. 17. Dined at the Fox & Goose, Musselburgh.… Lucky I did not go yesterday, as a company of only 8 or 10, chiefly Shiel’s friends, drank 27 bottles of claret & 12 of port, besides Punch, & were all beastly drunk.’ Such drunkards ‘died by their own hands’, opined
Steele’s
Tatler
. The irony of toasts was not lost on the Georgians: ‘to drink health is to drink sickness.’ For, stated George Cheyne, ‘running into
Drams
’ was ruinous; ‘neither
Laudanum
nor
Arsenick
will kill more certainly, although more quickly’. And who knew better of the dangers of dissipation than that Scottish physician who wrestled all his life to restrain the appetites which he knew were medically so lethal?

Born in Aberdeen in 1673 and trained at the University of Edinburgh in Newtonian science and mechanistic medicine, Cheyne migrated to London to make his fortune as a physician. He rapidly established a name as a witty man-about-town with ‘Bottle-Companions, the younger Gentry, and Free-Livers’. Gaining a reputation as ‘a Scotchman with an immense broad back, taking snuff incessantly out of a ponderous gold box’, he hobnobbed in coffee houses and taverns with a free-living crowd (as was the custom among young physicians), so as to get himself known and build up a trade, ‘nothing being necessary for that Purpose, but to be able to
Eat
lustily, and swallow down much
Liquor
; and being naturally of a large
Size
, a cheerful Temper, and Tolerable lively
Imagination
… I soon became caressed by them, and grew daily in
Bulk
and in Friendship with these gay Gentlemen.’ The consequence, however, was that he grew ‘excessively fat, short-breath’d, lethargick and listless’. Fearing for his life, he quit London and put himself on an austere (greens, milk and seeds) diet, until he saw his podgy flesh melt away ‘like a Snow-ball in Summer’. Over the years, Cheyne’s weight was to go up and down with monotonous frequency.

His worst crisis came around 1720, when, experiencing ‘a Craving and insufferable Longing for more Solid and Toothsome Food, and for higher and stronger Liquors’, he became a three-bottle man and blew up to thirty-two stone (some 450 pounds), eventually needing a servant to walk behind him carrying a stool, on which to recover every few paces. His legs erupted in scorbutic ulcers; erysipelas and gout followed; and he took refuge in the ‘slow poison’ of opiates. At his grossest, he confessed, he ‘went about like a Malefactor condemn’d’, his gluttony producing ‘Giddiness, Lowness, Anxiety,
Terror’, ‘perpetual Sickness,
Reaching
,
Lowness
,
Watchfulness
,
Eructation
’, and a nervous hypochondria which ‘made Life a Burden to myself, and a Pain to my friends’. In old age, he recalled his worst crisis:

I had been so exceedingly fat, and overgrown beyond any one I believe in Europe, that I weighed 34 Stone, this had so stretched my Skin and Belly, that when I was shrunk to a common Size by many repeated Vomits, want of Sleep, a perpetual Lowness, Loss of Appetite, and Inability to digest any Thing but Milk and Bread, my Gouts fell out through the Cawl where the Spermatic Vessels perforate it and made a kind of Wind Rupture which was some Years a Breeding unheeded.

Cheyne proved one of the most widely read prophets against physical excess in what was becoming a weight-watching age. Being a doctor, he largely expressed his warnings in medical terms, explaining in a series of books, including
The English Malady
(1733), based upon his own experience, how corpulence produced derangements of the digestive and nervous systems which impaired not only health but mental stability. Tension or laxity of the nervous system produced anxiety, the horrors, sleeplessness, nightmares and fear of death. Excesses of the flesh bred infirmities of the mind.

Cheyne’s call to medical moderation was, however, also an expression of a mystical Christian Platonism trained at the emancipation of the spirit – he can thus be thought of as recasting traditional Christian bodily anxieties into physiological and medical idioms. For Cheyne, the flesh was indeed the spirit’s prison house. Excessive flesh encumbered the spirit; burning it off emancipated it.

Following the teachings of the German mystic Jakob Boehme, he imagined prelapsarian bodies innocently feeding on ‘Paradisiacal Fruits’. After the Fall, the flesh of the newly carnivorous humans had been subjected to the laws of corruption of matter. Addressing ‘
Expiation, Purification
, and
progressive Perfection
’, his works aimed at recovering the purity of the prelapsarian body. So, through keeping the ‘pipes’ of the body clear of ‘peccant Humours’, vegetarian diet also relieved fallen humanity from ‘the present
load of corruption
’ and soothed the ‘mortal Distemper’ which had afflicted sons of Adam
ever since the Fall. The ritual of weighing the soul was an iconographic topos familiar to Christianity from the ceremony of the weighing of sins at the Last Judgement.