Speaker: Lisa Haushofer, Doctoral Candidate, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University; Haas Fellow, Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Contact: Shana Rabinowich, shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu
Chair: Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Abstract:
The advent of new chemical and physiological interpretations of food and digestion during the nineteenth century fundamentally transformed the bodily experience of eating and digesting as a mode of relating to the world. This period also saw the emergence of a group of commercial food products based on scientific research conducted in the laboratory, and credited with the ability to stave off sickness and promote health. This talk examines how such therapeutic products functioned as vehicles of knowledge transmission, embodying and communicating new understandings of the eating and digesting body. Focusing on two popular but mostly forgotten products – ‘peptonized’ and ‘peptogenic’ foods - which capitalized on physiological research on digestive ferments (or enzymes), the talk traces the scientific, economic, and social concerns reflected in the products’ imagined mechanisms and modes of administration. By exploring commercial medicinal consumables, the talk seeks to understand how the unstable and commodified intersection of food and medicine contributed to shape conceptions of the eating and digesting body, and of the modern self.
Biography:
Lisa Haushofer is a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University and currently a Haas Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Her dissertation examines the emergence of a new category of medicinal consumables located at the unstable conceptual and regulatory boundary of medicine and food in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain and the US. She holds an MA in history of medicine from the Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine at University College London and an MD from the University of Witten-Herdecke, Germany.
