Dr Emma Spary

Emma Spary began her professional academic life as an historian of science, specialising in the history of eighteenth-century French natural history. After a career break to have a family, she came to the Centre in February 2006 as a Research Fellow to work on a book project concerned with medical and scientific accounts of food in Paris between 1675 and 1815. She then took up a post in September 2007 as Lecturer in the History of Eighteenth-Century Medicine. Her interests span the domains of health, nutrition, medical chemistry, the Parisian corporations, the French food and drugs trade, and the relations between medicine and Enlightenment in general. She also maintains an interest in the history of the sciences and their relationship with medical knowledge and practice in the early modern period.

e.spary@ucl.ac.uk
e.c.spary@btinternet.com

Research

Food as a medical object in Paris, 1675-1815
Food, by definition, is what is absorbed into the body, leaving no historical trace. In altering itself, it also alters the body of the eater. What was eaten, how it was eaten and by whom are not simple issues, even though they concern everyday acts,  which are at once corporeal, political, moral, aesthetic and epistemological. The project addresses the ways in which appetite and taste were at once political and medical issues in the highly commercialised urban setting of eighteenth-century Paris. A necessary underpinning to this approach is the investigation of commercial activity in the urban marketplace in relation to prepared food goods such as health foods, liqueurs, gelatine and lemonade. Also central to the enquiry is the world of eighteenth-century medical chemistry in the city, whose practitioners, largely pharmacists and physicians, were responsible for the production of new specialist foods and also acted as State consultants over food surrogates and government policy on institutional diet and hunger.

Dietetic recommendations aimed at the cultivation of mind were replaced around the middle of the century by characterisations of polite urban eaters as valetudinarians and the creation of a market for health advice and products. By the early nineteenth century, this "bourgeois medical doctrine" had been complemented by the disciplined, quantified and interchangeable medical subjects of public hygiene and philanthropic poor relief. In effect,, as medical authority changed its relationship to the State during the "long eighteenth century", this altered political relation came to be manifested by differences in dietary advice and practices, as well as new accounts of food and eating. To consider the circumstances under which medical recommendations were adopted in everyday life, in the form of changed eating habits, is to enquire into the nature of medical authority itself.

Profile

1988	BA, University of Cambridge
1991	MA, University of Cambridge
1992	Research Fellow, Girton College, University of Cambridge
1993	Ph.D., University of Cambridge
1995	Research Fellow, University of Warwick
1998	Senior Researcher, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
2006	Research Fellow, WTCHM
2007	Lecturer, WTCHM

Selected publications

Books

Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). French edition: Paris: Editions du Muséum, 2005.

Editor with N. Jardine and J. A. Secord, Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Editor with Anke te Heesen, Sammeln als Wissen (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001).

Articles

'Political, Natural, and Bodily Economies' in N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (eds.) Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 178-196.

'Le Spectacle de la nature. Contrôle du public et vision républicaine dans le Muséum jacobin' in C. Blanckaert et al. (eds.) Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire (Paris: Éditions du Muséum, 1997) 457-479.

'Making a Science of Taste: The Revolution, the Learned Life, and the Invention of Gastronomie ', in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.) Consumption and Culture 1650-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) 170-182.

'The 'Nature' of Enlightenment, in W. Clark, S. Schaffer and J. Golinski (eds.) The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 272-304.

'Codes of Passion: Natural History Specimens as a Polite Language in Late Eighteenth-Century France', in P. H. Reill and J. Schlumbohm (eds.) Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis, 1750-1900 (Göttingen: Vanderhoek & Ruprecht, 1999) 105-135.

'Scientific Symmetries', History of Science , 62 (2004): 1-46.

''Peaches which the Patriarchs Lacked': Natural History, Natural Resources, and the Natural Economy in Eighteenth-Century France', in N. De Marchi and M. Schabas (eds.) Oeconomies in the Age of Newton ; History of Political Economy , supplement to vol. 35 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) 14-41.

'Of Nutmegs and Botanists: The Colonial Cultivation of Botanical Identity', in L. Schiebinger and C. Swan (eds.) Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) 187-203.