In the first part of his magnum opus, The Anatomy of Melancholy, the 17th-century writer Robert Burton provides an elaborate table to help readers differentiate the various forms of the malady he describes. One, which he identifies as ‘hypochondriacal or windy melancholy’, is characterised by ‘wind, rumbling in the guts, belly-ake, heat in the bowels, convulsions, crudities, short wind, sowr and sharp belchings’. As Elsa Richardson demonstrates in Rumbles, the conflation of gut health with mental health, the emotional with the intestinal, was not limited to early modern scholarship. It has always coloured our thinking about the messy and unglamorous digestive organs.

Like the digestive system itself, Rumbles crams a surprising volume of material into a modest space. This is an absorbing, serpentine, sometimes tangled account of… of what, exactly? Richardson acknowledges in her introduction that the word ‘gut’ is, if not actually ambiguous, at least open to multiple interpretations. To many readers it will suggest the intestines, but for the purposes of this ‘curious history’ she goes the whole nine yards (approximately). She considers the entire gastrointestinal canal between mouth and anus, while also supposing that what goes in one end, and comes out the other, is just as important as the tube itself. ‘What we eat,’ Richardson writes, ‘the foods we find palatable, those we find disgusting, the diets we follow, the practices we adopt around sanitation and the feelings we attribute to waste are all freighted with heavy social, cultural and political baggage.’ This is a cultural history not just of the gut, but also of how it makes us behave.

The terms of reference, then, are broad, and the subject matter is correspondingly diverse. We learn of the evolution of Western knowledge about the digestive system, from the humoral theory of Galen to the current obsession with the human gut microbiome, the trillions of microorganisms that influence not just our