The extensible digestive system: biotechnology at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, 1890-1900

Abstract

In the closing decade of the 19th century the Battle Creek Sanitarium, located in southern Michigan, operated as a health resort for invalids. Best known as the place where breakfast cereal was first packaged and mass-marketed, its most famous product — Corn Flakes — was the result of ceaseless experimentation to find a concoction that would serve the pharmacological purpose of healing patients. Through the course of healing at the sanitarium, digestion was paramount. This article demonstrates how digestion and the body were linked with technological implements housed in the sanitarium, creating a spatialized network of bodies at the sanitarium, and highlighting the material impacts of an early form of biotechnology. I ask not what does digestion look like — as a strictly anatomical process — but what does the geography of digestion look like — as a mapping of the digestive organs with the technologies that make it possible? This rendering demonstrates that the boundary between body and environment is not so strict, as witnessed in this earlier formation of biotechnologies. This point is made in a narrative account of the significance of eating and digestion at the sanitarium in the 1890s.