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Over the 150 years of Miller's story, a great deal changed, and, less visibly, remained the same, in the way doctors and the laity understood stomach complaints. Driven by various brands of medical expertise, dyspepsia began to split into a range of more or less discrete conditions. It started out as one thing with many forms, and it became many things, each with its own diagnostic practices, causes and cures. Much of this followed on from the work of Beaumont and others in the 1820s and 1830s: new techniques appeared for securing knowledge of the stomach and its doings. Different techniques tended to belong to different kinds of medical practitioner. Who had the right to interpret human innards?
Among the increasingly prominent specific ailments, peptic ulcers took pride of place.
The history of the stomach, as Miller shows, does not simply rise towards reductionism. The stomach's management and feeding is too implicated in frames of personal identity and moral value to be encompassed by chemical and structural accounts. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries there were many attempts to secularise the stomach - to disconnect the understanding of its pathologies and the prescription of its care from mental and moral life - but they never wholly succeeded. --Steven Shapin, London Review of Books, 30 June 2011