Abstract
In the literature investigating the long history of appeals to ‘nature’, in its multiple meanings, for rules of conduct or justification of social order, little attention has been paid to a long-standing tradition in which medical and physiological arguments merged into moral and social ones. A host of medical authors, biologists, social writers and philosophers assumed that nature spoke its moral language not only in its general economy, but also within and through the body. This is why, for instance, many critics of Malthus argued that physiological self-regulating mechanisms ensured a spontaneous adaptation of fertility to the circumstances. Beliefs in a beneficent economy of nature persisted when Providence was replaced by evolution. To some, they provided reasons for hope even when others worried about ‘unfit’ members of society increasing at a quicker rate than ‘fit’ ones. The nerves gradually replaced food and blood as moral mediators between society and the body. When faith in bio-social progress was shaken by degeneration theories, and fin de siècle anxiety concerned underpopulation rather than overpopulation, not an insignificant proportion of those who emphasised the bad effects of modern (hyper)civilisation resorted to ideas and arguments based on a view of the body in which physiology and morality worked together. A common language and common assumptions linked the Kulturpessimisten to their optimistic eighteenth-century colleagues, in spite of their different forecasts. The present paper traces continuities and discontinuities in the operation of a persistent set of interrelated ideas and assumptions on the coalescence of the physiological and the moral across disciplines and contexts.
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Notes
As the literature on the subject is simply enormous, let me just refer to Daston and Vidal (2004) and its bibliography. They argue that “there is a distinct tendency in the European tradition to the present to create experts in the natural—at first physicians and natural philosophers, and later scientists. Such experts were (and are) relied on to interpret nature, especially in controversial cases involving politically charged issues such as race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and labour”. Both in the “Enlightenment tradition of assertions about the normative dictates of nature and the moral vocation of scientists” and in the nineteenth-century tendency for experts to express disinterested opinions on nature as an allegedly neutral judge, construals of nature were crucial, whether they operated openly in the discursive legitimation of practices or, in “a less visible but no less powerful” way, as tacit assumptions (ibid., 7–8). See also Bondì & La Vergata (2014), La Vergata (2014).
The locus classicus is, of course, Linnaeus (Linnaeus 1972; La Vergata 1990b; Koerner 1999). “Linnaeus never distinguished the moral from the natural. He conflated illnesses of the body and the mind, classifying both as moral failings” (Koerner, 1999, 74). This principle lay at the basis of his work as a botanist, zoologist, physician, ethnographer and economist, of his manuscript on Diaeta naturalis (1733) as well as that on Nemesis divina (late 1750s–1765). “At the heart of Linnaean medicine […] lay a call to moral rejuvenation” (ibid., 71). He claimed he had proved that man could live in harmony with nature, and that he had “discovered some principles through which man could double his age, without illness, according to natural principles”. The Sami inhabitants of Lappland enjoyed perfect health because they were ignorant of “inflaming alcoholic beverages, tobacco, tea, coffee, sugar, silk, most spices”. Linnaeus (ibid., 71, 75, 130) criticized luxury food and fashionable habits, including almonds, oysters, raisins, wall paper, music concerts, maid servants, oil paintings, plaster, “large windows”, “coffe and chocolate, jams and confections, wines and lemonades, jewels and pearls, gold and silver, silk and pomade, dances and parties, music and theater”. He was in favour of bans on import of foreign food, and its replacement by homeland products. Coffee, for instance, was not only a plant that could never be successfully planted in Sweden, since its homeland was on the equator, but also, as Koerner sums it up (ibid., 130), “a French fashion and therefore a moral and medical hazard”. It could be replaced by a brew of “boiled water mixed with burnt peas, beechnuts, almond, beans, maize, wheat, or toasted bread”.
The philosopher and statistician Richard Price (1780) agreed. His claim that the population of England and Wales was in decline started a controversy. It was challenged, in particular, by another statistician and economist, John Howlett (1781), who argued that it had doubled since 1688 and was still increasing, at a quickening pace, to the benefit of the rural poor.
Mayhew 2014, 22. Mayhew rightly remarks that the picture of a decaying population that authors such as Robert Wallace and John Brown (writing in 1753 and 1757, respectively) extrapolated from the London Bills of Mortality was “factually false”, which is indirect evidence of their moral bias.
Bacon (1623, 1627). As Eversley (1959, 164–165) remarked, “whether from the ancients or Bacon, such ideas [on moderate eating, hard work and abstinence from immoderate sexual life] certainly passed into common usage”. He adds: “Not until the twentieth century did it become clear that even people actually starving might be prolific”. But even Alfred Marshall (whose Principles of Economy, published in 1890, reached their 8th edition in 1930) “might be cited as a subscriber to the ‘food’ theory” (ibid., 166, 168). Other instances of early ‘food and hardship’ theories are given by Kuczynski (1938).
Teaching and practice of medicine were far more advanced, and more in contact with developments on the continent, in Scotland than in England. It is well known that Charles Darwin himself went to Edinburgh to study medicine.
Many instances are given by Eversley (1959), which is still the best discussion of the subject.
There is a vast literature on the ‘Malthusian controversy’. Let me just refer to Winch (1987, 2009), Sieferle (1990), Schabas (2005), Mayhew (2014, 2016), Smith (2013), Hale (2014). None of them, however, with the partial exeption of Sieferle, deals with the ‘moral economy of the body’ when discussing Malthus’ opponents. On Malthus, medicine and morality, see Dolan (2000).
Darwin’s reaction to Spencer’s theory was twofold. On 23 February 1860 he complimented him: “You have put the case for selection in your Pamphlet of population in a very striking & clear manner”. But 2 days later, in a letter to Charles Lyell, he described Spencer’s ideas on the consequences of excessive expenditure of sperm-cells as “such dreadful hypothetical rubbish on the nature of reproduction” (Darwin 1985–, vol. 8: 106, 109–110). On different dates, Darwin read many works written against “Malthus’ great work”, including Godwin, Doubleday and Hickson. He said they had hardly had any any influence on him. He also discussed Carpenter and took notice of the remark of the “acute observer”, the geologist Hugh Miller (1854, 266), that the harder the conditions of life, the more fecund is the individual. He hoped to refute this and similar opinions by drawing on French statistics (for instance Villermé, 1831), who had studied the distribution of births throughout the year and concluded that fertility diminishes in the periods when the climate is unhealthier, epidemics more frequent, and food scarcer (La Vergata,1990a: 164–172). On Spencer’s theories on mind and behaviour see Richards (1987).
Quoted by Cervetti (2012, 120–121), who comments that an “entanglement of morality, politics, and the female body [was] founded on the assumption that womb sympathies, limited energies, and the inheritance of acquired characteristics were medical facts”. She also points out the influence exerted by the views concerning typical female diseases held by the professor of obstetrics in the Jefferson Medical College, Charles Meigs, in Females and their Diseases (1848).
Greg also referred to Doubleday’s theory. He said he had found in Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868) evidence that “hidden causes” influenced fertility; therefore, one might assume that “the artificial life which we call civilisation” might alter it in men as in animals.
Darwin (2004, 162–166). Darwin relied on the statistical inquiries of the Scottish physician and Superintendent of Statistics in Scotland, James Stark, according to whom “at all ages the death-rate is higher in towns than in rural districts”, as well as those “of our highest authority on such questions”, the physician and medical statistician William Farr. “On the whole—Darwin wrote—we may conclude with Dr Farr that the lesser mortality of married than unmarried men, which seems a general law, ‘is mainly due to the constant eliminationof imperfect types, and to the skilful selection of the finest individuals out of each successive generation’; the selection relating only to the marriage state, and acting on all corporeal, intellectual and moral qualities. We may, therefore, infer that sound and good men who out of prudence remain for a time unmarried, do not suffer a high rate of mortality” (ibid. 166; emphasis added). In this way both Malthus and natural selection were vindicated.
Duncan (1871, 3). He quoted (pp. 3–4, 215–216) two other, slightly different definitions by Anon. [F. Jenkin] (1867) and Tait (1867). Both Fleeming Jenkin, an engineer, and Peter Guthrie Tait, a physicist, were Scots, and collaborated with Lord Kelvin. Darwin was particularly impressed by Jenkin’s article. Both Duncan and Jenkin agreed with Malthus that overpopulation was a real threat, but were critical of his opposing the geometrical increase of man to the arithmetical increase of food resources. They invoked Darwin’s struggle for life to argue that the multiplication of both men and, say, wheat was limited by virtually the same checks (La Vergata, 1990a, 257n).
Freedman 1968, 371; Petersen 1979, 64–65. This distinction applies to the English language. In French and Italian the reverse is true, or has been true until the influence of English resulted in fécondité and fecondità loosing ground to fertilité and fertilità in medical language. The same fate seems to be attending on the German Fruchtbarkeit with respect to Fertilität.
Duncan sent Darwin a copy of the second edition (1871) of his 1866 book. Darwin read and annotated it. In The Descent of Man he quoted Duncan’s “On the Laws of the Fertility of Women” (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 24, Part II (1865–1866), 1867, 287–315; published separately in 1871 under the title “Fecundity, Fertility, and Sterility”). In the last pages of his Edinburgh report, read on 5th February 1866, Duncan, “without pretending to enter on defence of Malthusian notions”, criticised Sadler’s “illogical use of the facts”, complaining that, “down to the latest authors, Sadler’s facts and supposed demonstrations are generally quoted with unsuspicious approval”.
The syndrome was so Protean, and the term so flexible, that in many authors the very definition of the concept became officially, and blatantly, generic. The French psychiatrist Charles Féré wrote in 1894: “When the specific qualities that characterise the race are no longer transmitted by inheritance, when in a family the children no longer resemble to their parents and their brothers and sisters, when this results in an alteration of the adaptation to the physical and social environment, we say that the race degenerates” (quoted by Borie, 1981,155). To the American dental surgeon Eugene Talbot (1898), degeneration “meant, in fact—as Nancy Stepan (1985, 112–113) sums up—any and every conceivable kind of illness, social pathology, deviance, abnormal psychological state or physical condition […] which was caused by some transgression of social, moral, or physical rules and which became established in the hereditary constitution of the individual”. Juvenile criminality, sexual perversions, chronic misery, idiocy, physical and behavioural characteristics of ‘lower’ races: all were consequences of degeneration.
Morel, 1857, 605. Here and elsewhere in those days (and until at least the first decades of the twentieth century) the term ‘race’ was commonly used in a very loose sense, not always in its racialist meaning. Morel was a monogenist: to him “there were […] no degenerate races, but degenerations within the races” (Nicasi 1986, 315). He was clear: in a London house where no air circulates and in an Ethiopian marsh where heaps of grasshoppers fester “the danger that is generated is the same”. The countyside is no longer the home of health: its inhabitants, too, are now victims of “neuroses that once seemed to be the privilege of the rich class or of blasés and exhausted individuals: hysteria, hypocondria, chlorosis” (Morel, 1857, 605).
Morel, 1857, 334. Morel was not the first to emphasise the all-importance of the nervous system. The eighteen century had been pervaded by a craze and a “mythology” of the nerves (Rousseau 2004). Nor was he the first (or the last, for that matter) to lay so much stress on inheritance. As Émile Zola summed up in a single sentence what he had learned from Prosper Lucas’ Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle dans les états de santé et de maladie du système nerveux (Paris, 1850), “all nervous diseases are inherited” (Borie, 1981, 80).
To mention Zola once again, in his last novel, Fecondité (1899), he argued that increased fertility was both the means and the effect of the physical and moral regeneration of France.
He collaborated with H.G. Wells to advance scientific education as a remedy to social decline (Barnett 2006). On Lankester and degeneration see La Vergata (2012). Hale (2014, 301–334) reconstructs the extremely complex biological and political debate on degeneration. He shows that it was exacerbated by the social and political implications of Weismann’s theories of the “all-sufficiency of natural selection” as an evolutionary mechanism and, more particularly, of degeneration resulting from “panmixia” (that is non-selective interbreeding in a population following a weakening or suspension of selection). At stake was the relation beween nature and society. In his famous lecture on “Evolution and Ethics” (1893) and the “Prolegomena” he later added to it (1894), the Malthusian Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog”, interpreted it as a contrast between two opposite forces, thereby rejecting Spencer’s optimistic and “savage” individualism, and, at the same time, plans for radical social reform. He also raised doubts on eugenics, which he described as “pigeon-fancier’s policy” (Huxley, 1893–1894, vol. 9, 1–45, 46–116).
Hale 2014, chapters 6–7. La Vergata (2012) also considers L’évolution régressive en biologie et en sociologie, published in 1897 by three Belgians, the zoologist Jean Demoor, the botanist Jean Massart and the historian and leading socialist Émile Vandervelde. They held that biological and social phenomena were governed by the same laws, including one according to which, and unlike Lankester’s opinion, “evolution is always and at the same time both progressive and regressive”. Degeneration, was “not an accident, but a universal phenomenon”, “the necessary complement of all changes, whether anatomical or social”, for any modification entailed the development of some structure and the concomintant atrophy or loss of others. “Social parasitism” was a cause of degeneration, but, fortunately, it was not hereditary: it spread through “imitation”, not reproduction. Therefore, its effects were not so deep as those of its biological counterpart. Being favoured by a defective social order, social parasites, be they individuals or classes, could be eliminated from a better organised society. In a word, socialism was able to exorcise the spectre of degeneration (Massart & Vandervelde 1897; Demoor et al., 1897). It is interesting that the three authors did not believe that acquired characters were inherited. In this, they were almost unique in the French-speaking world of the time.
Robert A. Fleming, A Short Practice of Medicine, 1919, 265–268; quoted by Lawrence (2009, 470).
Like many of his colleagues, in his American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881), Beard pointed to modern civilisation as the source of nervous exhaustion, which included among its many symptoms “special idiosyncracies [sic] in regard to food, medicines, and external irritants” (quoted by Mitman 2004, 441; see bibliography ibid., note 7).
Le Bon, 1929, 16, 19. This is the 36th edition of La psychologie des foules, unchanged, Le Bon says, from the first (1895).
Ambivalence and ambiguity are shown mostly clearly by the fact that the discourse on degeneration often intermingled with that of regression and atavism, that is reversion to, or resurgence of, more primitive stages of evolution. Atavism and reversion meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but it was generally admitted that they did not result in reduced vitality, but in brutal, primitive violence. The age-old idea of ‘the beast in man’ as the source of our evil passions was updated: within modern man there still lay hidden our feral ancestor, the primitive man, the savage, ready to disrupt the thin layer of recently acquired civilisation and to escape the still precarious control of reason (Pick, 1989; La Vergata 2019). Mr. Hyde of Stevenson’s story (1886), the beastly part of human nature, was violent. So was the bête humaine of Zola’s novel (1890). The main character of Frank Norris’ novel Vandover and the Brute (1914), is characteristically double-faced: he has fits of lycanthropy, but, like a genuine degenerate, he delights in spending hours in his bathtub, smoking and gorging himself on chocolates.
That is an irresistible tendency to shopping (a forerunner of today’s ‘shopaholicism’?). The term had been coined by the French psychiatrist Magnan.
But in § 224 Nietzsche mentions “improvement by degeneration” and says that “degenerate natures are of the utmost importance whenever a progress is to be made. All progress must in general be preceded by some partial weakening”. As is well known, Nietzsche is a pretty kettle of fish. An excellent discussion of his attitude(s) towards degeneration and what Richard von Krafft-Ebing described in 1885 as “our nervous age” is Moore (2002).
On physio-pathology of fatigue see Rabinbach (1992).
Frisch (1984). It is interesting to remark that the physiologist Richard D. Keynes, on introducing the section of the Congrès international de démographie historique (Paris, UNESCO, 27–29 May 1980) at which Frisch presented her paper, used ‘fertility’ and ‘fecundity’ as synonyms (Congrès international de démographie historique 1980, 205). In the Proceedings volume, he only used ‘fertility’ (Keynes 1984).
Let me just mention a couple of very recent contributions to an enormous literature: Conforti et al. (2018); Cariati et al. (2019). On 25 June 2019, at the 35th Annual Meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) in Vienna, Antonio La Marca presented evidence that air pollution affects female fertility, as decline in ovarian reserve is related to particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide in atmosphere. I am grateful to him for providing me with the press release on his research. See also The Times, June 26, 2019.
To mention only one recent instance: on 29–31 March, 2019 the XIII World Conference of Families, organized by the International Organization for the Family, was held in Verona, Italy. Participants ranged from traditionalist representatives of various religions to right-wing political leaders and more or less extreme defenders of the “natural family” (as their slogan went) and “natural” behaviours against such “unnatural” things as homosexuality, abortion, in vitro fertilization, birth control, genetic engineering.
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La Vergata, A. Food, nerves, and fertility. Variations on the moral economy of the body, 1700–1920. HPLS 41, 47 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0272-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0272-z