The extensible digestive system

Biotechnology at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, 1890-1900

Bibliographic Data

ID2405893
AuthorsNicholas Bauch (Stanford University, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume18
Issue2
Pages209-229
Publication date2011-04-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Geographies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1474-4740 • E-ISSN: 1477-0881
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1474474010393646
OpenAlexW2082445807
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited17

In the closing decade of the 19th century the Battle Creek Sanitarium, located in southern Michigan, operated as a health resort for invalids. Best known as the place where breakfast cereal was first packaged and mass-marketed, its most famous product - Corn Flakes - was the result of ceaseless experimentation to find a concoction that would serve the pharmacological purpose of healing patients. Through the course of healing at the sanitarium, digestion was paramount. This article demonstrates how digestion and the body were linked with technological implements housed in the sanitarium, creating a spatialized network of bodies at the sanitarium, and highlighting the material impacts of an early form of biotechnology. I ask not what does digestion look like - as a strictly anatomical process - but what does the geography of digestion look like - as a mapping of the digestive organs with the technologies that make it possible? This rendering demonstrates that the boundary between body and environment is not so strict, as witnessed in this earlier formation of biotechnologies. This point is made in a narrative account of the significance of eating and digestion at the sanitarium in the 1890s

Archaeology · Art · Battle · Biology · Digestion (alchemy · Literature · Narrative · Chemistry · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Biotechnology

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