Between Food and Medicine: Artificial Digestion, Sickness, and the Case of Benger's Food

In the nineteenth century, food and diet became central to a public health increasingly focused on individual behavior and on the cost of sickness. Because of its potential to impact the economic uptake of food inside individual bodies, digestion became a crucial site of physiological investigation in this context. Out of physiological research on digestion emerged a group of medicinal food products based on digestive enzymes (then referred to as digestive ferments), so-called artificially digested foods. The paper examines the creation and significance of these products, focusing on the case of Benger's Food. It places Benger's Food in the context of shifting professional boundaries between physicians, pharmacists, and nurses and changing approaches to the pathophysiology of sickness. Contrary to previous enzyme-based products, Benger's Food was not imagined as a specific therapeutic targeted at a particular digestive disease, but as a universal solution to illness. To function as a public health tool, Benger's Food had to be broadly applicable and palatable, and be understood as a food rather than as a medicine. The paper uncovers the conceptual and material work involved in achieving this. By doing so, it shows the intersection between food and medicine as the result of a historically specific process of creation and management.