This book is concerned with the stomach and its ailments within the broad period 1800 to 1945. Throughout, I will also address wider issues regarding the complex interaction between reductionism and holism which informed the understanding and management of gastric illness during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, I map contested approaches adopted by different medical disciplines and investigate the nature, functions and consequences of competing discourses regarding the stomach and its physiological role. This entails an engagement with themes relating to the rise of reductionism and medical professionalism, and the function of holistic models of the body within these historical processes.

Such themes are highly relevant today as medical professionals continue to debate the role of the mind in causing stomach complaints, as exemplified by the issue of whether or not stress plays a defining role in the production of gastric ulcers. Since the discovery of H pylori bacteria as the most likely cause of gastric ulcer disease in 1983, its treatment has tended to become predominantly reductionist in nature, as gastroenterologists express an inclination to eliminate bacteria in the stomach. This approach is contested by those wishing for greater interest in the patient and the potential role of environmental and psychosomatic factors in disease causation. The extent to which the patient as a whole should be incorporated into therapeutic regimes is therefore a problematic contemporary issue.