Introduction
In 1863, a well-respected undertaker in Victorian London published the first best-selling ‘diet book’. William Banting’s Letter on Corpulence: Addressed to the Public (Appendix 1) was a self-funded, evangelical treatise that advocated what we now know as a ‘LCHF’ (low carb, high fat) regime and quickly became a best-seller, producing 6 editions and over 50,000 copies over two years (Critser 2003). Situated in the heart of Cunningham & Williams (1993) re-framed timeline for the ‘origins of modern science’, Banting’s book can be analysed and situated within the Victorian cultural infrastructure of science, and science communication using Cunningham & Williams historiographic principles, and as such clarified as an exemplary artefact of Citizen Science, a populist instigator of reactive boundary-work in the existing scientific establishment, and a unique literary and cultural ideologue that embodied Kant’s “Sapere aude” –that all individuals should exercise their own reason and judgement, to think for themselves and not rely slavishly on the expertise of others (Bensaude-Vincent 2001). Banting’s volume, although publicly popular only briefly (Huff 2001) went on to inform scientific dietary recommendations by his contemporaries (Harvey 1872, Brinton & Napheys 1870) and perhaps more importantly, to inform rigorous scientific debate and aggressive boundary work (Gieryn 1983) from the medical science community –many of whom would go on to legitimize it scientifically via publication of their own scientific monographs (Bray 1993). Indeed Banting’s work has also served as a keystone for contemporary popularized diet-book authors in both voice and content (Taubes 2007, Astrup, Meinert Larsen & Harper 2004, Noakes, Creed & Proudfoot 2015), although none have so far adopted his unique not-for-profit approach to information dissemination.
1. The foundations of the first public diet book: Literature, Sociology, and Dominant Ideologies.
Cunningham and Williams (1993) asserted that science needed to be re-conceived as historically contingent: cognisant of the values, aims and norms of the particular social group from which it emerged. In order to achieve this they suggested the application of four historiographic principles for analysis:
1. That the basic values and norms of science are things that require explanation, rather than things which are to be taken for granted;
2. That knowledge in any society is an integral product of that society;
3. Actor’s categories –that we must understand how past people thought of and performed their work in order to appreciate authentic meaning and identity;
4. To focus on question: what question –both immediate and what project of enquiry –in the life and world of the person who wrote it, was this text or artefact the ANSWER for its author?
This interpretation and analysis will proceed with these principles as corner stones.
1.1 William Banting was obese. At the age of 65, widowed and newly retired from being undertaker to the Royal house, he weighed 202lbs (91.6kgs) and was 5’5” tall. This puts his Body Mass Index at 33.8 –officially ‘obese’ according to both modern and 19thC standards. Along with the accompanying physical ailments he noted (unable to bend down to lace his shows, carbuncles, umbilical lesions, increasing sight and hearing problems, inability to perform normal ‘offices’, pain in ankle joints requiring him to walk down stairs backwards), he also emphasized the psychological horrors of his condition:
“Of all the parasites that affect humanity I do not know of, nor can I imagine, any more distressing than that of Obesity” . (Banting 1863)
Echoing the common dietary testimonials of today, he records that in order to escape his affliction, he had tried everything recommended by medical science – multiple doctor’s visits, starvation diets, increased exercise, and regular Turkish baths. In Victorian London, it seems the advice to the overweight did not differ enormously from today’s evidence-based suggestion of ‘eat less, move more’ (Hannley 2014, Meerman & Brown 2018). It was only when his own doctor was unavailable that he attended the Soho offices of aurologist Dr William Harvey (Edwardes 2003) and was prescribed a dietary regime known to the scientific communities of the day (Brillat-Savarin 1839, Dancel 1850 & 1857) and that had been recently elucidated for him at a Paris lecture by the infamous Dr Claude Bernard (Young 1957, Jörgens & Grüsser 2013). Bernard’s work on liver glycolysis and diabetes had convinced Harvey that it was not how much one ate that contributed to obesity, but what. As a result, Banting was prescribed a diet heavy in meats and non-starchy vegetables, and forbidden bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes. In scientific process, this was jumping directly from hypothesis based on observational animal studies to human trial. Modern scientific ethical considerations notwithstanding, Banting became Harvey’s experiment. Within a year, Banting lost 46lbs (21kgs) and was determined to share the message as widely as he could:
“I am desirous of circulating my humble knowledge and experience for the benefit of my fellow man, with an earnest hope it may lead to the same comfort and happiness I now feel under the extraordinary change –which might almost be termed miraculous”. (Banting 1863)
1.2 Obesity, or ‘corpulence’ then, as now, was not seen merely as a physical phenomenon but was laden with moralistic sociological ideology and equally embedded within a rigid political class system. An obese undertaker, even he was in service to the Royal Household, had fundamentally ‘failed’ to uphold English masculine ideals (Haslam & Rigby 2010). The ‘science’ of the subject was both in its infancy (Egan 1994) and not commonly disseminated in science’s dominant authority, The Royal Society of London’s weekly scientific journal publications, ‘The Athenaeum’ and ‘The Literary Gazette’ (James 2018). Social awareness of obesity was more strongly embedded in the literature, religious ideals, and entertainment tropes of the day. Extreme obesity was displayed at “freak shows” (Haslam & Rigby 2010) and the avid Victorian reader assured in both literature and the ubiquitous penny-dreadful, that “fat” was equated with “effeminacy and unmanliness” (Critser 2003), “poor moral character” (Vaninskaya 2011) and an assault on the laws of geometry and classical beauty itself (Brinton & Napheys 1870). In Victorian England, science was not even a usual school subject. Any knowledge of the sciences would have been due to an individual’s own informal reading, visits to museums or exhibitions, or attendance at public lectures (Fyfe 2008). Moreover, in a Christian country, “Gluttony” was seen as a sin twinned with “lust” – a connection still apparent in today’s linguistic use of the word ‘appetite’ to describe each of these human drives (Stockslager 2009). The anarchy and chaos of Shakespeare’s famous fat man, Falstaff, had been replaced in the public mind with a more castrated trope such as that embodied in Henry Fielding’s 1742 character of the distasteful Parson Truilliber in Joseph Andrews. External ‘pulpiness’ was equated with internal pulpiness set in direct opposition to internal strength and firmness (Gilbert 2004) and was considered anaethema to ideals of Victorian manhood (Tosh 2007).
2. Production and Messages: self-publication, abandonment of “literary nullification of self”, and evangelism.
Buoyed and exuberant at his personal weight-loss success, particularly after decades of trying all contemporary recommendations to no avail, Banting settled upon evangelical self-publication as his only reasonable option to disseminate his findings. His opening thoughts elucidate the social and scientific mores of the time in a discussion of considered publication avenues. Firstly, he expresses the desire to name and acknowledge ‘the author of his redemption’ but is afraid ‘such publicity might be construed improperly’. Further he avoids claiming any kind of scientific ‘breakthrough’ but offers his ‘personal experience as the stepping stone to public investigation’, simultaneously begging the reader’s forbearance for ‘any fault of style or diction’ or ‘presumption in publishing’. Immediately following, Banting tells us that he had hoped for publication in The Lancet, or The Cornhill Magazine, but recognises his status as an ‘insignificant’ and ‘unknown’individual as a barrier to such publication avenues (Banting 1863, 3rd Edn). The answer then was to abandon scientifically sanctioned publication and produce two self-funded editions distributed at no cost to the public, and a third retailing at sixpence a copy. All profits from the third and subsequent editions were donated to hospital charities (Edwardes 2003). Although Banting did not follow science’s “literary nullification of self”, nor avoid the moral-ethical language forms deemed “non-scientific” (Montgomery 1996, p104), the parallel self-abnegation common to Victorian class and gender ideologies is strikingly clear (Stuckey 2011).
In the mid 19thC, it was the writings of William Wadd, Surgeon-Extraordinary to the Prince Regent that held most authority on the subject of obesity (Pennington, 1954). Namely, that obesity was “an over-indulgence of the table” further diagnosed by an accompanying phrenological interpretation of a disturbance in the “organ of gustativeness” (Wadd 1829). Following Wadd’s publication, the science of physiology had advanced and obesity theory reworked to include the work of both Lavoisier and Justus von Liebig’s proposals of specific organic molecules (sugars, fats, albumin, fibrin, and “proteins” (Rosenfeld 2003). The pathogenesis of obesity was summed up in 1850 as: “For the formation of body fat it is necessary that the materials be digested in a greater quantity than is necessary to supply carbon to the respiration” (Chalmers 1850). Banting’s enormous popularity and the subsequent medical response to that popularity is exemplary of scientific ‘bounday-work’ (Gieryn 1983). This lay publication was criticized as being unscientific, freakish, and the diet ‘too expensive’ (MacKarness 1958). Consequently, ‘the academy’ went on to explain the diet in terms of current scientific consensus, and where that failed, the diet was modified “to overcome the theoretical objections” (Pennington 1954). Scientific omniscience regained the upper hand and Banting’s ‘lay’ publication was rewritten and adapted by accepted authors, journals and fellows (Niemayer 1866, Harvey 1872).
3. Receptions Public and Scientific: identifiable patterns in Nutrition Science Communication.
Banting’s letter sold more than 58,000 copies by 1865, and was followed by three subsequent editions. It was further published in colonial India (Duke 1878) and translated into German, Polish and French (Bray 1993). There can be little doubt that Banting’s letter was both popular, and widely read. The moral voice of Victorian Christianity was outraged at the selfishness of considering personal appearance above poverty and greater societal ills (Kirschenbaum 2000), and the scientific community equally outraged at the imposition of the laity on their ‘turf’ (Huff 2001). Then, as now, human nutrition remains a contentious topic. It is inherently cross and multi-disciplinary in nature and as such was, and continues to be challenging in research, application and public communication (Allison et al. 2015, Döring & Ströhle 2015). Despite centuries of advances in knowledge across scientific disciplines, Nutrition Science is still failing to make a dent in an enormous global health crisis (Walls et al. 2018, Adams 2015, Pollan 2007) and Banting’s individual experimentation, anecdotal discovery and subsequent evangelical self-publication blueprint remains a common reaction to uncertainty, inefficacy and rapidly shifting scientific advice (Folker & Sandoe 2008). Then, as now, nutritional scientific consensus was fraught. Harvey, Dancel, Bernard and Brillat Savarin’s research and hypotheses ran counter to common dietary consensus among the fellows of the Royal Society. In essence, it mirrors 2019 almost exactly: The ‘eat less move more’ ideology vs the LCHF strategies. Indeed, both ‘strain’ and ‘interest’ theories of social ideology continue to overlap in both eras (Gieryn 1983) and Meyer (2016)’s identified marketing, missionary activities and democratization of message can be clearly seen within both the reactions of sanctioned ‘science’ and equally in Banting’s communication efforts.
Although the field of Nutrition Science has broadened considerably since Banting’s 1863 publication, public frustration with conflicting theory and the inefficacy of nutrition science communication continues to mirror 19thC London and the ‘gap’ between the common man’s ‘ways of knowing’ and that of the scientific community. Cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias continue to be weaponized concepts thrown regularly by warring sides of the Nutriton/Obesity debate (Jones 2017). What has changed is the stakes. Obesity was present in 19thC London, but it was far from a global epidemic. The mid-Victorian incidence of non-communicable degenerative disease was approximately 90% less than that of Londoners today (Charlton & Murphy 2004). One thing is certain: the political tribalism or ‘us vs. them’ of science vs. the public in nutrition science communication must be abandoned (Mannix & Nagler 2017; Pender et al. 2017). Banting may not have been ‘right’, he may not even have been close –but his example within the cultural infrastructure of science and science communication continues to be played out to this day. At very least, that should make us sit up and notice a worrying lack of progress in Nutrition Science communication.
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