Busman’s stomach and the embodiment of modernity

Hayward, Rhodri

doi:10.1080/13619462.2016.1226806

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Virol & Milk advertisements often show men in suits sitting at their desks surrounded by papers with their head in their hands or pacing their offices nervously with their hands interlocked behind their backs (Figure 11). These images fit with the growing belief that work pressure and the hectic pace of modern life had a direct impact on emotional strain and physical health, particularly for men, 117 and regularly reoccur across advertisements for nerve food and radium-based food. 118 Here, anxiety is described as 'the curse of modern life' and men are warned that their 'viral current of nervous energy is failing' and not to 'wait until the tension gets too strong and something snaps' before they act.…”

Section: 'Don't Let Your Child Die': Preventing Malnutrition With Virolmentioning

confidence: 57%

“…76 As such, a stream of aperients were launched onto the market by canny businessmen who used a relentless barrage of advertising aimed at frightening mothers into giving their children daily doses. 77 Virol immediately saw an opportunity in this growing culture of concern around gastric health, adding a dash of paraffin to its product and releasing it under the name Virolax in 1915.…”

Section: 'Don't Let Your Child Die': Preventing Malnutrition With Virolmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Blinded by science? Constructing truth and authority in early twentieth-century Virol advertisements

O’Hagan

2021

History of Retailing and Consumption

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This paper conducts a case study of the marketing of Virola malt extract preparation that was popular in early twentieth-century Britainusing advertisements from British newspapers. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, it explores how marketers drew upon linguistic/semiotic resources to embed Virol in discourses of scientific knowledge and how these discourses were made to appear true. Through targeted marketing campaigns, Virol established consumer bases framed around three health concerns: malnutrition, constipation and anxiety. Using testimonies, buzzwords, photographs and infographics, Virol created an illusion of scientific rationality, yet the studies or authority figures behind their findings were never explicitly specified, leaving consumers to make assumptions about the product's benefits using their own limited understandings. As women were the primary household shoppers, 'scientific motherhood' (and 'wifehood') was also drawn upon, producing a dichotomy that framed women as responsible for their families' health, yet incapable of this responsibility without expert intervention.

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Section: 'Don't Let Your Child Die': Preventing Malnutrition With Virolmentioning

confidence: 57%

Section: 'Don't Let Your Child Die': Preventing Malnutrition With Virolmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blinded by science? Constructing truth and authority in early twentieth-century Virol advertisements

O’Hagan

2021

History of Retailing and Consumption

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“…Yet it is not inevitable that the biomedical rendering of the worker's body through technologies should lead to depoliticization and individuation. As Hayward's (2017) account of the 1930s London bus driver strike attests, bus drivers were able to collectively organize around a novel concept of stress as a cause for their gastrological complaints. They achieved this with reference to psychophysiological and endocrinological knowledge, drawing on laboratory studies of fatigue and animal studies of psychosomatics of stress.…”

Section: Metricization and Bodily Sensation: Psychology And The Scien...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Stressing the ‘body electric’: History and psychology of the techno-ecologies of work stress

Pykett

Paterson

2022

History of the Human Sciences

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This article explores histories of the science of stress and its measurement from the mid 19th century, and brings these into dialogue with critical sociological analysis of emerging responses to work stress in policy and practice. In particular, it shows how the contemporary development of biomedical and consumer devices for stress self-monitoring is based on selectively rediscovering the biological determinants and biomarkers of stress, human functioning in terms of evolutionary ecology, and the physical health impacts of stress. It considers how the placement of the individual body and its environment within particular spatio-temporal configurations renders it subject to experimental investigation through standardized apparatus, electricity, and statistical normalization. Examining key themes and processes such as homeostasis, metricization, datafication, and emotional governance, we conclude that the figure of the ‘body electric’ plays a central limiting role in current technology-supported approaches to managing work stress, and that an historical account can usefully open these to collective scrutiny.

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“…2 Like others, we are interested in understanding how scientific and social objects emerge out of a tangled field of heterogeneous phenomena (e.g. Hayward 2017). Mind wandering was initially one of many scientific and/or popular terms used to describe relatively unconstrained mental activity (e.g.…”

Section: Wandering Mindsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is a Psychological Task? The Operational Pliability of “Task” in Psychological Laboratory Experimentation

et al. 2019

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There has been no sustained sociological analysis of a near ubiquitous feature of psychological laboratory experimentation: the task. Yet the task is central in arranging the means by which phenomena are isolated and brought into the experimental scientist’s purview. As scientific objects, states such as mind wandering and daydreaming have been made visible in experiments that draw on a (sometimes) sharp distinction between what it means to be either “on task” or “off task”––which entails a long history of what it means to have a subject attend to her task, a central aspect of the psychology experiment since its foundation. Through an analysis of qualitative interviews with research participants in studies of so-called “mind wandering,” it becomes clear that task is deployed and understood in multiple ways: it is often hard to distinguish when a person is on task and when they are not; when participants reflect on their own internal states the boundedness that the concept relies upon is drawn sharply into question; and the complex spatio-temporal organization of experiences of both mind wandering and task disrupts the metaphorical structures that the scientific literature has baked into these terms. The term “operational pliability” allows us to understand how the pliability of the practice and concept of task is central to how task functions. Operational pliability offers a way of understanding how particular elements in scientific investigation are easily adaptable and at the same time are able to hold some kind of shape or form.

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Busman’s stomach and the embodiment of modernity

Cited by 7 publications

References 48 publications

Blinded by science? Constructing truth and authority in early twentieth-century Virol advertisements

Blinded by science? Constructing truth and authority in early twentieth-century Virol advertisements

Stressing the ‘body electric’: History and psychology of the techno-ecologies of work stress

What is a Psychological Task? The Operational Pliability of “Task” in Psychological Laboratory Experimentation

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