The Telegraphic Body: Dyspepsia, Modern Life, and ‘Gastric Time’ in Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Culture

TL;DR

The paper explores how 19th-century ideas about digestion and the gut were shaped by metaphors related to telegraph technology, linking them to modern concepts like the gut-brain axis.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of 'gastric time' as a historical framework for understanding digestion through the lens of communication and bodily rhythms.

Findings

The telegraph metaphor was used to conceptualize digestion as a process involving time, space, and communication.

The gut was historically viewed as a central, interconnected system akin to a telegraphic network.

'Gastric time' reflects how bodily rhythms and disruptions were understood through communication technologies of the era.

Abstract

From Italian physician Hieronymus Mercurialis’s contention that the stomach was ‘the king of the belly’, to its promotion by the end of the nineteenth century to the ‘monarch of humanity’ in patent medicine, to Byron Robinson’s discovery of the enteric nervous system in 1907 (a mesh of neural connectivity that led him to dub the gut ‘the second brain’), there has historically been a longstanding awareness of the expansive reach of the gut in the functions of the body. In the nineteenth century, the authority of the gut and its allyship with the brain became a focus for writers thinking about the intersections of illness and ‘modern life’. In medical texts, domestic health manuals, patent medicine, and fiction, the electric telegraph in particular became a way of envisaging what we would now call the ‘gut-brain axis’. The telegraphic metaphor enabled a view of digestion as not simply a mechanical or chemical process, but one that was understood in terms of time, space, and communication. However, such a framework also suggested problems of connection that were common to both systems, emphasising not only the healthy body’s quasi-telegraphic networks but also its vulnerability to delay, disruption, and pathological incoherence. This article will explore the use of telegraphic technologies as proxies for theorising gastric connection and more broadly the concept of ‘gastric time’ as a key conceit for understanding digestion as a process that was and is subject to the idiosyncrasies of bodily rhythms.