Inside story

ACCORDING to Hippocrates, the ancient-Greek physician hailed as the Father of Western Medicine, “all diseases begin in the gut”. Indeed, before the prim Victorians, guts had a starring role in human biology — people seemed to have had a visceral understanding of their central role. “I feel it in my guts”, “you haven’t the guts”, “gut instinct” … The intellectual feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about her unruly intestines in a love letter to Gilbert Imlay, unconventional even by the standards of the day.

By the time I was growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, brains had overtaken guts as the locus of pain and tribulation. In fact, today, most of us would be hard-pressed to identify correctly where our stomachs are. (Clue: much