The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, by Rembrandt
Say you are learning English, and you are trying to figure out what “gut” means. Ah, a beer belly. But who would equate a beer belly with courage? Then your doctor talks about your gut, which is hardly distended, or brave; he seems to refer to coiled innards. Yet a bratty bully yells at your kid at school, “I hate your guts!” He hates his intestines? His beer belly? His courage? “Trust your gut,” a wise teacher whispers to him, “when you choose your friends.” And make sure they are funny, so you can bust a gut, and trustworthy, so you can spill your guts….
The gut is a place of confusion. Of processing, absorption, and waste; of spasms and swarming bacteria. The more I learn about the gut microbiome, the more awed I am by its power. Early in the Enlightenment, the gut was seen as the seat of the imagination, Will Boast notes. “It processed emotions and perception and was so spiritually attuned it perhaps even contained the soul.”
I would rather think of my soul residing somewhere a little more fragrant. But it is true that the gut is “deeply networked into the rest of the body,” as Elsa Richardson writes, “and strangely entangled with the intricacies of our psychic lives.” Which explains why diagnoses of irritable bowel syndrome are on the rise, in this time of constant irritation, fretting, gnawing on worry. Also Crohn’s disease, witness that long gluten-free aisle in the fluorescent supermarket, and ulcerative colitis, and digestive cancers. Richardson, whose book has the delightful title Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut, sees it as “a palimpsest onto which the concerns and anxieties of the present day are traced.”
In last week’s battery of alarming news alerts, I found myself saying, again and again, “This makes me sick.” For the first time, I understood Sartre’s existential nausea. Until now, my digestive system has been blessedly untroubled, able to consume ghost peppers or heaping dollops of wasabi without consequence. But neurogastroenterologists (the specialty a mouthful in itself) now tell us that the stomach has a role to play in cognition, and my brain is sending its own alerts straight to my gut.
Hardly a surprise. When friends are facing a big, tricky life decision, my stock advice is to choose one option, then see how their stomach feels, then test the other option on their stomach. The gut knows, I insist, sloppily extending the word to both stomach and intestines. My friends should not trust me. The stomach is a prime site for demonic intervention. Prophyry of Tyre even urged vegetarianism because he believed demons lurked in the flesh of dead animals, waiting to enter us.
Why use dead animals? Because the demons “rejoice in meat on which their pneumatic part grows fat,” he explains, “for it lives on vapours and exhalations, in a complex fashion and from complex sources, and it draws power from the smoke that rises from blood and flesh.” Once inside us, these demons cause noxious gases, bloating us and making us belch and fart.
I knew there was a demon to blame.
But I will avoid expounding on my wind, because Diocletian Lewis, an American health reformer, saw a strong connection between digestion and politeness. By offering bread and butter or passing the gravy to others, “we interrupt the otherwise unbroken shovelling-in business.” Also, “the temper induced by this mutual kindness is eminently favorable to the stomach functions. A kind action always tends toward health.”
That last sentence should be a bumper sticker.
So many connections can be drawn between the rumbling, bubbling churn inside us and the surrounding world. Biologist Michael Gershon sees the digestive tract as an “open tube that begins at the mouth and ends at the anus…a tunnel that permits the exterior to run right through us.” The abundance of the land enters our lips, often during social rituals that bind us to each other. The energy we draw from that sustenance fuels our life’s projects. And the residue of that energy exits at the other end. Along the way, we take what we need or suffer its lack.
Food is for thought. We are hungry for information; we chew on ideas and find some tough to swallow. In that tangle of pink coils beneath our skin, the processing begins; only if it succeeds can the brain take hold. Back in 1700, though, Bernardino Ramazzini thought all the processing happened at once. He worried about scholars, warning them that it was possible to “die of wisdom,” because the body could not digest food while the brain was trying to digest an idea.
It is politics I cannot digest, yet the two are indeed linked. Richardson finds psychologists warning that “the disordered eating habits of the modern world are the result of mindlessly munching while scrolling through social media or staring glassily at rolling news.” Or writing this post, a brownie in one hand and a glass of red wine within reach. I eat when I am nervous. The news makes me nervous.
Before, when the future felt this uncertain and perilous, humans turned to haruspicy, using the viscera of sacrificed animals to prophesy. “Divine approval could be read from the plump fleshiness of a healthy bowel,” Richardson tells us.
If they autopsy me with the same intent, they will find an ooze of Camembert coating every organ. But while I live, a gastromancer (are there any still qualified?) could learn of coming events from the gurgle and plash of my stomach acid.
I am glad we do not, thirsty from dancing, ladle urine from a cooking pot, as the Zuni would do at their feasts. Yet the new healing rituals are not so different. Company Seed offers a database where you can upload quite personal photos to help train the AI to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy poop. Hard pebbles? A segmented cable? A smooth fat banana? Gushes of brown river water?
No need to say. But you might be called upon to provide some to your spouse. Fecal transplants work wonders for the gut microbiome—and married couples are, after all, used to taking shit from each other. “Tell me,” Voltaire wrote prettily, “what secret connection nature has created between an idea and a bowel movement.” After millennia, we are still learning not only what lives inside our poop but how to poop. Ever so sophisticated, we gave up primitive squatting to sit serenely on porcelain, constipated and retentive. Only now are doctors pointing out that squatting was far more efficient.
But squatting? In public, convivially, as is still done in some countries? That would take the other sort of guts.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
