This open access book explores the history of pellagra, a vitamin deficiency disease brought about by a shift in agriculture to maize, and which was first identified in Italy in the 1760s. With a focus on the insanity that was caused by the disease, the authors examine how thousands of patients were treated in Italian psychiatric asylums, shedding light on the sufferer’s point of view. Setting pellagrous insanity in a wider context of man-made or societal (anthropogenic) disease, where poverty, diet and disease meet, the book contributes to the history of medicine and science, the history of psychiatry, economic and social history, agrarian history, and food and nutrition history. Additionally, the authors aim to transnationalise Italian history by making comparisons with related issues, such as tertiary syphilis in the UK. Drawing from a wide range of printed and archival sources, including the writings of Italian medical investigators, the book examines how medical and scientific research was carried out during the long nineteenth century and the uncertainties that this engendered, in terms of classification, explanation, diagnosis and treatment. Offering a unique perspective on an endemic illness which came to be known as the disease of the four ds: dermatitis; diarrhea; dementia; and death, this book provides an engaging account of one of the most perplexing causes of mental illness.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2016 Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is both a history of food practices and a history of the medical discourse about that food. It is also an exploration of the interaction between the two: the relationship between evolving foodways and shifting medical advice on what to eat in order to stay healthy. It provides the first in-depth study of printed dietary advice covering the entire early modern period, from the late-15th century to the early-19th; it is also the first to trace the history of European foodways as seen through the prism of this advice. David Gentilcore offers a doctor's-eye view of changing food and dietary fashions: from Portugal to Poland, from Scotland to Sicily, not forgetting the expanding European populations of the New World. In addition to exploring European regimens throughout the period, works of materia medica, botany, agronomy and horticulture are considered, as well as a range of other printed sources, such as travel accounts, cookery books and literary works. The book also includes 30 illustrations, maps and extensive chapter bibliographies with web links included to further aid study. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is the essential introduction to the relationship between food, health and medicine for history students and scholars alike.

Proteins, Pathologies and Politics presents an international and historical approach to dietary change and health, contrasting current concerns with how issues such as diabetes, cancer, vitamins, sugar and fat, and food allergies were perceived in the 19th and 20th centuries. Though what we eat and what we shouldn't eat has become a topic of increased scrutiny in the current century, the link between dietary innovation and health/disease is not a new one. From new fads in foodstuffs, through developments in manufacturing and production processes, to the inclusion of additives and evolving agricultural practices changing diet, changes often promised better health only to become associated with the opposite. With contributors including Peter Scholliers, Francesco Buscemi, Clare Gordon Bettencourt, and Kirsten Gardner, this collection comprises the best scholarship on how we have perceived diet to affect health. The chapters consider: - the politics and economics of dietary change - the historical actors involved in dietary innovation and the responses to it - the extent that our dietary health itself a cultural construct, or even a product of history This is a fascinating and varied study of how our diets have been shaped and influenced by perceptions of health and will be of great value to students of history, food history, nutrition science, politics and sociology.

Little has been written about the potato's Italian history. This book examines the important role it has played in Italy's social, cultural and economic history. Italy, like the rest of Europe, owes a lot to the 'Columbian exchange'. As a result of this process, in addition to potatoes, Europe acquired maize, tomatoes and most types of beans. All are basic elements of European diet and cookery today. The international importance of the potato today as the world's most cultivated vegetable highlights its place in the Columbian exchange. While the history of the potato in the United States, Ireland, Britain and other parts of northern Europe is quite well known, little is known about the slow rise and eventual fall of the potato in Italy. This book aims to fill that gap, arguing why the potato's 'Italian' history is important. It is both a social and cultural history of the potato in Italy and a history of agriculture in marginal areas. David Gentilcore examines the developing presence of the potato in elite and peasant culture, its place in the difficult mountain environment, in family recipe notebooks and kitchen accounts, in travellers' descriptions, agronomical treatises, cookery books, and in Italian literature.

From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the Italian Protomedicato tribunals, Colleges of Physicians, or Health Offices (jurisdiction varied from state to state) required charlatans to submit their wares for inspection and, upon approval, pay a licence fee in order to set up a stage from which to perform and sell them. The licensing of charlatans became an administrative routine. As far as the medical magistracies were concerned, charlatans had a defineable identity, constituting a specific trade or occupation. This book studies the way charlatans were represented, by contemporaries and by historians, how they saw themselves and, most importantly, it reconstructs the place of charlatans in early modern Italy. It explores the goods and services charlatans provided, their dealings with the public and their marketing strategies. It does so from a range of perspectives: social, cultural, economic, political, geographical, biographical and, of course, medical. Charlatans are not just some curiosity on the fringes of medicine: they offered health care to an extraordinarily wide sector of the population. Moreover, from their origins in Renaissance Italy, the Italian ciarlatano was the prototype for itinerant medical practitioners throughout Europe. This book offers a different look at charlatans. It is the first to take seriously the licences issued to charlatans in the Italian states, compiling them into a 'charlatans database' of over 1,300 charlatans active throughout Italy over the course of some three centuries. In addition, it makes use of other types of archival documents, such as trial records and wills, to give the charlatans a human face, as well as a wide range of artistic and printed sources, not forgetting the output of the charlatans themselves, in the form of handbills and pamphlets.

This open access book explores the history of pellagra, a vitamin deficiency disease brought about by a shift in agriculture to maize, and which was first identified in Italy in the 1760s. With a focus on the insanity that was caused by the disease, the authors examine how thousands of patients were treated in Italian psychiatric asylums, shedding light on the sufferer’s point of view. Setting pellagrous insanity in a wider context of man-made or societal (anthropogenic) disease, where poverty, diet and disease meet, the book contributes to the history of medicine and science, the history of psychiatry, economic and social history, agrarian history, and food and nutrition history. Additionally, the authors aim to transnationalise Italian history by making comparisons with related issues, such as tertiary syphilis in the UK. Drawing from a wide range of printed and archival sources, including the writings of Italian medical investigators, the book examines how medical and scientific research was carried out during the long nineteenth century and the uncertainties that this engendered, in terms of classification, explanation, diagnosis and treatment. Offering a unique perspective on an endemic illness which came to be known as the disease of the four ds: dermatitis; diarrhea; dementia; and death, this book provides an engaging account of one of the most perplexing causes of mental illness.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2016 Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is both a history of food practices and a history of the medical discourse about that food. It is also an exploration of the interaction between the two: the relationship between evolving foodways and shifting medical advice on what to eat in order to stay healthy. It provides the first in-depth study of printed dietary advice covering the entire early modern period, from the late-15th century to the early-19th; it is also the first to trace the history of European foodways as seen through the prism of this advice. David Gentilcore offers a doctor's-eye view of changing food and dietary fashions: from Portugal to Poland, from Scotland to Sicily, not forgetting the expanding European populations of the New World. In addition to exploring European regimens throughout the period, works of materia medica, botany, agronomy and horticulture are considered, as well as a range of other printed sources, such as travel accounts, cookery books and literary works. The book also includes 30 illustrations, maps and extensive chapter bibliographies with web links included to further aid study. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is the essential introduction to the relationship between food, health and medicine for history students and scholars alike.

Proteins, Pathologies and Politics presents an international and historical approach to dietary change and health, contrasting current concerns with how issues such as diabetes, cancer, vitamins, sugar and fat, and food allergies were perceived in the 19th and 20th centuries. Though what we eat and what we shouldn't eat has become a topic of increased scrutiny in the current century, the link between dietary innovation and health/disease is not a new one. From new fads in foodstuffs, through developments in manufacturing and production processes, to the inclusion of additives and evolving agricultural practices changing diet, changes often promised better health only to become associated with the opposite. With contributors including Peter Scholliers, Francesco Buscemi, Clare Gordon Bettencourt, and Kirsten Gardner, this collection comprises the best scholarship on how we have perceived diet to affect health. The chapters consider: - the politics and economics of dietary change - the historical actors involved in dietary innovation and the responses to it - the extent that our dietary health itself a cultural construct, or even a product of history This is a fascinating and varied study of how our diets have been shaped and influenced by perceptions of health and will be of great value to students of history, food history, nutrition science, politics and sociology.