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SCHOOL OF HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
RESEARCH SEMINAR
SEMESTER TWO 2022
MONDAY 17th OCTOBER 2022
FROM 5:30PM
Location:
F23 Michael Spence Building, Level 5, Room 501
Zoom:
https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/83458114235
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ELIZABETH ROBERTS-PEDERSEN
'WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO STARVE' : HUNGER IN THE BIOLOGY OF HUMAN STARVATION
(1950)
Abstract: Between November 1944 and October 1945, researchers from the
Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene at the University of Minnesota induced
semi-starvation in a group of young male volunteers drawn from the Civilian
Public Service labour pool. Housed for the duration of the experiment in
temporary facilities under the university’s Memorial Stadium, most volunteers
lost a quarter of their body weight on a semi-starvation diet designed to
replicate nutritional conditions in parts of occupied Europe. In 1950 the
results were published as The Biology of Human Starvation, a landmark
two-volume work describing the systemic effects of undernutrition. In this
publication the Minnesota researchers proposed that semi-starvation produced ‘a
special kind of person’, one quantifiably different ‘morphologically,
chemically, physiologically, and psychologically from his well-fed
counterpart.’ Yet for all the data they compiled, the researchers struggled to
conclusively quantify or describe a fundamental element of the experiment: the
volunteers’ experience of hunger. In this paper I discuss the Minnesota
researchers’ attempts to grasp ‘what it feels like to starve’, as The Biology
of Human Starvation put it, and how these efforts can help frame a broader
history of ideas about hunger.
Bio: Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in History at the
University of Newcastle, where she recently finished an ARC DECRA fellowship on
the uses of psychiatry during the Second World War. She is completing two
monographs under contract: one on psychiatry and suffering during the Second
World War, and the other on the history of the idea of mental health.
WHEN: MONDAY 17TH OCTOBER 2022
START: 5.30PM
Location:
F23 Michael Spence Building, Level 1, Room 501
Zoom:
https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/83458114235
All Welcome | Registration not required | Free
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