Integración de los resultados (cuantitativos y cualitativos) a la metodología para la

Traditional European medicine had for centuries understood the human body to be a vessel filled with humoural fluids. Following the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen in classical and Roman times, the body was conceived as being divided into three zones - the head, torso and lower body - which were differentiated hierarchically, with the head considered the most superior zone sustaining the body’s intellectual functions.49 The ‘medical gaze’, the origin of which Foucault ascribed to the growth of capitalism during the latter part of the eighteenth century, brought “human existence, human behaviour and the human body … into an increasingly dense and important network of medicalization that allowed fewer and fewer things to escape”.50

It created the body, and the diseases that affected it, as an object of medical examination and gave rise to the view (commonly held today in Western

49

Albrecht Koschorke, ‘Physiological Self-Regulation: The Eighteenth Century Modernization of the Human Body’, Modern Language Notes, 123 (2008), p. 470. 50

Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (London: Penguin, 2002), vol. 3,p. 135.

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culture) of the gendered body as ‘fixed’ in nature.51 Attitudes in anatomical studies had become more accepting of dissection over the course of the eighteenth century; however, the relative lack of access to bodies to dissect meant seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century medical practice largely continued to be conducted through an opaque body, meaning that physicians were unable to easily see internal systems and mechanisms.

This difficulty in studying the inner workings of a physical human body meant that references to bodily processes were often by nature metaphoric - discussing balance and sympathetic relationships between the organs and the humours, and comparing the microcosm of the body to the macrocosm of the universe.52 The corporeal exterior was understood to signify the state of the interior - so the hair, skin, complexion and colouring unique to an individual was a signpost to their internal imbalances and humoural constitution. These physical characteristics were understood to reflect personality and character as well, with blemishes or defects on the external body believed to be the physical embodiment of the internal mental state. The condition and colour of the hair was deemed a signifier of character and state of health of an individual.53 A common theme in medical writing centred on the effect an individual’s humoural physiology could have on the colour and state of their hair, and suggested that the effect of the humours on hair was such that,

51

Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 10.

52

Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 16; Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (London: Sage, 2008), p. 8.

53

J. Mather, A Treatise on the Nature and Preservation of the Hair, in Which the Causes of its Different Colours and Diseases are Explained (London: Printed by A. Grant, 1795), p. 11.

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according to Scottish physician James Keil (1673-1719), “their [the hair] different Colours depend much upon the different Temperaments and Quality of the Humours that nourish them”.54

Historians of medicine commonly see the eighteenth century as the time when academic medicine began to turn away from humoural pathology, and Cartesian ideas of mind/body dualism gained common medical currency.55 By the mid eighteenth century Galen and Hippocrates were far from being the primary model by which physicians conducted their research; although these older, well- established paradigms were often aligned to newer beliefs.56

Tracing changing scientific understanding of the nature of hair exemplifies shifts in broader medical thinking. New theories on the make-up of the body were introduced, although they were often set against a broader backdrop of continuity in both practice and published popular works. The language of the humours was still in place, although understanding of the very nature of ‘humours’ had shifted between the end of the seventeenth and the end of the eighteenth centur ies. In later

54

James Keill, The Anatomy of the Human Body Abridg’d (London: Printed for J. and F. Rivington, 1734), 9th Edition, p. 17.

55

William Coleman, ‘Health and Hygiene in the Encyclopédie: A Medical Doctrine for the Bourgeoisie’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 29:4 (1974), pp. 399-421; and Joanna Geyer-Kordesch ‘Passions and the Ghost in the Machine or What Not to Ask about Science in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Germany’, in Roger French, and Andrew Wear (eds.), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 145-64 provide detailed discussion of dualism and the acceptance of Cartesian philosophy.

56

See Turner, Body and Society for a full discussion on the Enlightenment’s understanding of the external world and rational enquiry led by Hobbes, Descartes, Kant and Locke. The increasing control of the state over everyday life, the decline of magic and the secularisation of culture are commonly cited as wider social shifts enabling new variations in medical thinking.

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publications, the meaning is applied in a way that reflected a newer mechanical (physical) and chemical understanding of how the body worked. Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) wrote that there were “many factors which determine the nature, the impetus and direction of the humours which circulate through our vessels”.57

In this sense, humours are described as all-encompassing internal liquids, vessels and animal juices that work in equilibrium with each other, in the same way as the classical understanding of the four humours. For Boerhaave, these humours could in fact be seen as the different components that make up blood, whilst he used ‘humour’ to describe all the blood, juices, oils and solids within the body.58 In the earlier part of his career, Boerhaave’s ideas followed the Cartesian paradigm believing the body to be a machine, and he identified its structure and the liquids within it as the most important “factors”.59

For Boerhaave, the structure of the tubes and vessels within the body were of crucial importance for the maintenance of life, and hair was part of this structure. Having proven that hair was a hollow vessel, Boerhaave placed it in the category of those tubes and vessels through which bodily fluids give life and motion to the body.60

The theories and writings of physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) are seen as underpinning the move from humoural physiology in which

57

Cited in A.M. Luyendijk-Elshout, and E. Kegel-Brinkgreve, Boerhaave's Orations (Leiden: Brill, 1983), p. 119.

58

Herman Boerhaave, Dr. Boerhaave’s Academical Lectures on the Theory of Physic (London: W. Innys in Pater-Noster Row, 1743), Vol. 2, p. 178-80.

59

Luyendijk-Elshout, and Kegel-Brinkgreve, Boerhaave's Orations, p. 97; Lisa Shapiro, ‘The Health of the Body-Machine or Seventeenth Century Mechanism and the Concept of Health’, Perspectives on Science, 11:4 (2003), pp. 421-42 provides a useful discussion of complexities of these ideas.

60

Rina Knoeff, ‘Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), Calvinist Chemist and Physician’, History of Science and Scholarship in the Netherlands, 3 (2002), p. 161.

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internal factors unique to individuals controlled wellbeing, towards the idea that external causes, such as the atmosphere, could have an effect on health. Writers and practitioners alike invested a great deal of time in making established concepts newly ‘scientific’, as well as building new models of medical and philosophical thought related to the human body and the human condition.61 One of the ways in which they did this was through the close study of human parts of the body such as hair, often quite literally by placing it under the microscope. Crucially the mathematical approach of Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) enabled mechanist physicians such as Archibald Pitcairne (1652-1713) to begin to use mathematical reasoning to understand sickness a nd health as a physical problem wherein observation and experiment could provide answers.62

Largely active in the late seventeenth century and first decade of the eighteenth century, mechanists like Pitcairne believed that the body’s systems and parts interacted like those of a machine, and could therefore be affected by material causes. This development of new corporeal understanding had the effect of strengthening the growing empirical and observational hypotheses for medical study and practice, which suggested that external, natural factors could have an effect on the health of the body as well as the traditional internal humoural imbalance, and that those were both measurable and quantifiable factors.63 Aligned with more traditional Hippocratic hypotheses, hair could still be a physical signifier of internal sickness or

61

Roy Porter, ‘Medicine, the Human Sciences and the Environment in the Enlightenment’, in Felix Driver, and Gillian Rose (eds.), Nature and Science: Essays in the History of Geographical Knowledge (London: Historical Geography Research Group, 1992), p. 27. 62

Anita Guerrini, ‘Isaac Newton, George Cheyne and the Principia Medicinae’, in French, and Wear (eds.), Medical Revolution, p. 225.

63

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health, which physicians now understood to be equally affected by external natural influences such as miasmas or atmospheric conditions.

These theories took some time to become visible in the regularly re-printed books written by many eminent physicians of the time. Humoural physiology was, it seems, so engrained in the psyche of western European scholarship that it endured as a concept throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whilst new theories of the body were gaining momentum.64 As such, humoural pathology remained a strong influence in understanding the nature of the human body and how it was connected to hair. In Pitcairne’s case, for example, he concluded that illness could be accounted for structurally through the function of the body and that good health depended on fluids within the body not being obstructed, a view very much influenced by traditional understanding of the body.65

Moving into the second decade of the eighteenth century, notions such as those followed by the physician George Cheyne (1671-1743) began to encourage patients to maintain a balance within the body through external factors such as diet and exercise, and underlined the importance of not over-exerting oneself. Cheyne’s ideas centred on maintaining health according to the principle of the ‘non-naturals’: external factors considered to affect man’s mental and physical well being including air, sleeping and waking, food and drink, rest and exercise, excretion and retention, and passions and emotions.66 The prominence of these non-naturals in keeping a healthy body is referred to commonly in medical literature of the time, particularly in advice for maintaining good health through the exercise and diet regimens recommended by physicians. This understanding is based in the notion of prevention

64

Ibid., p. 13. 65

Porter, ‘Medicine, the Human Sciences and the Environment’, p. 28. 66

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rather than cure. The prominent clients that Cheyne and his peers counted as patients made following particular diet and exercise regimes very popular curative methods.67 The affect of diet on the physical body was believed to vary according to the constitution of an individual, so some physicians varied their advice accordingly. Those who were fair skinned with fair hair for example, were advised to be less active and eat foods that could be easily digested by their delicate constitutions.68

The idea that control of the external environment was important to internal bodily health, whilst gaining prominence in the higher social circles of George Cheyne’s wealthy clients, did not gain universal popularity. An individual’s experience of what constituted their external environment was very much dependent upon the constraints of gender, social status and age, and therefore differed for different groups.69 Barbara Duden argues that whilst today everyone commonly aspires to perfect health, this aspiration is a modern day construct. For many in the eighteenth century, their immediate physical environment was not something that could be controlled by the individual, and therefore the definition of good health related to what they were directly prepared to tolerate.70 City dwellers in particular were relatively powerless to control their own health and often felt vulnerable to contagion from proximity to other people; parts of the body that remained uncovered

67

Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), states that Cheyne regularly weighed around 32 stone.

68

Anon., Letters to the Ladies in the Preservation of Health and Beauty by a Physician (London: Printed for Robinson and Roberts, 1770), p. 91.

69

Lindemann, Medicine and Society, p. 12. 70

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were considered to be unprotected from infection and disease.71 Hair, as an organic material, was considered a prime transmitter of infection, and as such, longer hair was kept tucked in, tied back, or pushed under a hat, in keeping with the well-clothed nature of bodies in general, hidden and protected as they were beneath various layers of inner and outer garments.72