Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut: The Secret Story of the Body’s Most Fascinating Organ

The fascinating--and often secret--history of the body’s most fascinating system: the gut.

The stomach is notoriously outspoken. It growls, gurgles, and grumbles while other organs remain silent, inconspicuous, and content. For centuries humans have puzzled over this rowdy, often overzealous organ, deliberating on the extent of its influence over cognition, mental well-being, and emotions, and wondering how the gut became so central to our sense of self. Traveling from ancient Greece to Victorian England, eighteenth-century France to modern America, cultural historian Elsa Richardson leads us on a lively tour of the gut, exploring all the ways that we have imagined, theorized, and probed the mysteries of the gastroenterological system. We’ll meet a wildly diverse cast of characters including Edwardian bodybuilders, hunger-striking suffragettes, demons, medieval alchemists, and one poor teenage girl plagued by a remarkably vocal gut, all united by this singular organ. Engaging, eye-opening, and thought-provoking, Rumbles leaves no stone unturned, scrutinizing religious tracts and etiquette guides, satirical cartoons, and political pamphlets, in its quest to answer the millennia-old question: Are we really ruled by our stomachs?

Elsa Richardson is an academic at the University of Strathclyde, England. She holds a Chancellor’s Fellowship in the History of Health and Wellbeing at the Center for the Social History of Health and Healthcare. In addition to lecturing in the history of medicine, she also curates arts and science events for public institutions, including the Wellcome Collection. Recently she was named one of the BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinkers. Elsa lives in England.