Making the body politic through medicine: taste, health and identity in the Dutch Republic, 1636–1698

Abstract How, where and by whom were bodies shaped, maintained and politicized through medicine, diet and taste in the seventeenth-century Low Countries? The medicinal use of foodstuffs, tastes and diets played an important role in the maintenance and restoration of health in the early modern period. Simultaneously, the metaphor of the body politic has been used widely in historical regimes, yet the focus tends to be on royalty or elite bodies, and on political literature and the medical metaphors used in relation to the body politic in such documents. In the seventeenth-century Low Countries,... Mehr ...