But with the improved standard of living came the dissipations of the high life. While malnutrition remained the prevailing concern for most of the population, a mounting number of the moderately well-off were growing fat. Doctors in England eyed the swelling number of fat people with consternation. In 1620, for example, the Oxford-trained English physician Tobias Venner lamented the rising rates of corpulence among the English.62 Using for the first time the word “obesus” to describe excess fat, Venner argued that “obesity” had adverse health consequences. He offered a treatment “to make slender such bodies as are too grosse.”63
The changes in the English diet enabled by sugar plantations in the colonies also led to rising rates of a purportedly related illness: gout. With the introduction of sugar and sugar-sweetened alcoholic beverages such as sack (a sugar-sweetened wine), gout was becoming an epidemic in England, particularly among men, who are more susceptible to the illness. Known previously as the disease of kings and the king of diseases, by 1683 the sweeping problem of gout prompted Dr. Thomas Sydenham to write A Treatise of the Gout and Dropsy in an effort to detail the etiology of the disease and offer practical advice to its sufferers.64
In Sydenham’s estimation, gout overwhelmingly struck those “who happen to be of a robust habit, who lead an indolent life, and are used to live very full.”65 The “robust habit” referred to a rich diet paired frequently with wine and beer. This behavior, he claimed, was particularly common among the male sex, since women rarely exhibited such a “voracious appetite” and “immoderate” drinking behavior.66 And, believing that overindulgence was the cause, Sydenham added that gout typically beset the “gross and corpulent,” although it occasionally befell lean and slender folk as well.67 Sydenham was himself a gout sufferer. He believed himself to be speaking both as a medical authority and as a fellow, fat, gout-afflicted man. Interestingly, while Sydenham and Venner pointed to diet as causes of corpulence and illness, neither recognized sugar as a potential cause. Sydenham, in the denial typical of a sugar addict, actually suggested that a concoction using brown sugar and the syrup of marshmallows be used as a cure.68
Sugar was rarely if ever recognized by seventeenth-century English physicians as the culprit driving both gout and what was described as “gross” corpulence. But this was largely because many doctors didn’t quite understand how along with the quantity, the quality of the food consumed, affected a person’s weight. This situation was to change in the coming century. Still, in Holland, the other country where sugar consumption, corpulence, and gout were on the rise, at least one seventeenth-century physician was making the connection among the three. In the same year that Sydenham published his Treatise, the Dutch doctor Stephen Blankaart wrote that the ubiquity of sugar in Amsterdam was associated with the marked increase of cavities, corpulence, and gout.69
Fatness was becoming more common, but it remained a condition common among the relatively well-off. Regardless, Western doctors were making nascent arguments about the link between fatness and ill health.70 Still, concerns about the physical health of the fat man as he partook of white gold and port wine was not the foremost concern of the high-minded Englishman. For the English intellectual, fat bodies had a different, pernicious association.
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In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, the king of Navarre and three of his oldest friends swear an oath of austerity. As part of the oath, they promise to remain celibate, fast one day each week, and eat only one meal per day the remaining days of the week. The pact was to last for three years.71 The character Longaville explains,
I am resolved: ’tis but a three years’ fast.
The mind shall banquet though the body pine.
Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits
Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.72
Longaville here describes a mind and body in conflict. When a man plies his body with food and drink, developing “fat paunches” and “rich ribs,” he is also bankrupting his wits. But when a man fasts, starves his body, makes it “pine,” now he is offering his mind a “banquet,” one that makes possible higher intellectual pursuits.
This quote, particularly the couplet that begins, “Fat paunches have lean pates,” was widely circulated in seventeenth-century England. Many believe it was originally penned by Shakespeare, but there is also evidence that he cribbed the idea from Saint Jerome, the fourth-century Roman priest. Jerome himself was thought to have translated the Greek expression “A fat belly does not produce fine senses.”73
Even if Shakespeare is not the ultimate source of the expression, it is consequential that several of his works propagated the view that slim men had sharp wits, whereas fat men were insipid. This was to be found, for example, in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, when Caesar states,
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.74
The view of fat men as too self-indulgent to be particularly intelligent was embodied in the character of Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff, who appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays, was creative and resourceful in some respects, but too much of a gluttonous, drunken, braggart and a thief to be taken as a thoughtful nobleman. He cops to this in Henry IV when he cries, “If I do grow great, I’ll grow less; for I’ll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do.”75
Coming from one of the most important artist-intellectuals of the English Golden Age, these and other works by Shakespeare make a broad cultural statement. They suggest that greater than concerns about the potential relationship between fat and health during this era was the dread of fatness as indicative of weak character and dullness of mind. Indeed, it was not only artists and poets who made such connections. Many important scientists and natural philosophers shared the perception that full stomachs were correlated to empty heads.
Figure 2.5. Eduard von Grützner, Falstaff, 1910.
The writings of René Descartes are a case in point. Though he was not an Englishman, Descartes’s ideas were incredibly influential among English intellectuals. He too claimed that base sensual desires, especially for food and drink, could stand in the way of higher pursuits. Condemning the animal appetites, Descartes offered counsel to those who might otherwise be prone to overindulgence in food and drink. In a series of letters on the topic to his friend Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, the granddaughter of King James I, he advised Elisabeth to regulate her food intake so as to ensure the best exercise of her mental faculties, urging “a good diet, taking only food and drink that refreshes the blood and purges without any effort.”76 Elisabeth countered: “As for the remedies against excessive passions: I agree that they are hard to practise, and indeed that they aren’t sufficient to prevent bodily disorders; but they may suffice to prevent the soul from being troubled and losing its capacity for free judgment.”77 These correspondences underscore the belief that eating too much stymied rational thought. Freeing oneself from the whims of sensual desire created space for intelligent thought and action.
Elisabeth was not the only English person privy to Descartes’s discourses on the appetites.78 His ideas about the relationship between appetites and intellect spread like wildfire in England. Those who did not identify as Cartesians respected his import, even reproducing similar notions, particularly when it came to questions of overfeeding.79 Walter Charleton, a natural philosopher and court physician to Elisabeth’s uncle, Charles I, was one such intellectual. Charleton published his own treatise on the perils of overindulgence. The “finest wits,” Charleton wrote, were not “the custody of gross and robust bodies; but for the most part [are lodged] in delicate and tender constitutions.”80 As a physician, Charleton was likely aware of the growing medical concern regarding portliness among English men. But, in keeping with many intellectuals at the time, Charleton’s own concern seems to have been less about the effects of excess fat on the body than about what corpulence