“Elixirs” discusses how hunger artists’ fasts were associated with a huge range of drugs, liquors and mineral waters, which provoked scientific controversies and public disagreements, but, at the same time, strengthened advertising campaigns in the medical market. The chapter also discusses the close link between hunger artists and homeopathic doctors in specific local contexts, in particular in the case of Succi’s fast in Barcelona in 1888, and the analogies between fasting practices and homeopathic regimes. The ingestion of specific liquors, which supposedly helped the fasters to withstand the pain of hunger in the first days -such as Succi’s famous liquor-, never achieved consensus among analytical chemists and doctors, nor was there any agreement on their narcotic or nutritive nature. Equally, in the battle to draw boundaries between orthodox and heterodox science, the composition of different mineral waters was an extra tool for advertisements in which doctors and hunger artists became active, complementary agents of credibility. Again, issues of trade, fraud and scientific objectivity resulted in controversy and frequent disagreements, but strengthened the promotion of hunger artists and their performances in the marketplace.

“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

At the intersection of the social, political, cultural and scientific realms, the introduction pressents a general framework for the wirting of a history of an embodiment of connections, that brings to the fore unexpected mechanisms of coproduction of knowledge, endless debates on objectivity and medical pluralism, and fierce struggles for the sake of authority, recognition and prestige on elusive subjects such as hunger, fasting, inanition and starvation. Since scientific controversies about hunger and inanition were not limited to academic circles, they spread throughout an urban public arena that acted as a useful playground in that battle for authority.