3 - Experiments

Summary

“Experiments” analyses how hunger artists reinforced, or sometimes questioned, the authority of a scientific experiment, in particular the value of three key spaces: the laboratory, the bed and the bench in experimental physiology. Through several cases of public fasting, it revisits traditional ways of assessing the epistemology of the experiment and the reliability of the new instruments of physiology that spread through the medical geography of the second half of the nineteenth century. The chapter also discusses the tension between animal experimentation and human tests in processes of inanition, and the complex relationship between doctors and hunger artists as objects of scientific research through the history of partners such as Drs Ernest Monin and Phillipe Maréchal and hunger artist Steffano Merlatti; Dr Luigi Luciani and hunger artist Giovanni Succi; Drs Carl Lehmann and Nathan Zuntz and hunger artists Francesco Cetti and Breithaupt; Dr Francis Gano Benedict and faster Agostino Levanzin. It reflects how doctors’ scientific interest in the study of the human body in a process of prolonged fasting also served hunger artists’ interests in public legitimation and social prestige, but often created tensions between the experimenters and the strict conditions endured by the objects of that scientific experimentation. The chapter also reflects hunger artists’ contribution to research on human metabolism, and the value of the study of the process of human inanition to quantify food intakes and outputs, and the internal consumption of the different tissues of the body. It also points out the doctors’ limitations in their numerous attempts to draw a clear line between the ‘inner’, ‘scientific’ space of the laboratory and the respiration calorimeters and the ‘outer’ commotion of the public performances, with the ‘sealed cage’ being a sort of common place to blur that dichotomy