New Year’s resolutions already a distant memory? The Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University in the UK is giving readers of their blog a preview of Louise Foxcroft’s recent book, Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2000 Years.

From the publisher’s website:

Calories and Corsets tells the epic story of our complicated relationship with food, the fashions and fads of body shape, and how cultural beliefs and social norms have changed over time. Combining research from medical journals, letters, articles and the dieting bestsellers we continue to devour (including one by an octogenarian Italian in the sixteenth century), Foxcroft reveals the extreme and often absurd lengths people will go to in order to achieve the perfect body, from eating carbolic soap to chewing every morsel hundreds of times to a tasteless pulp.

Read a review of this book from The Lancet, available to McGill users here.

Ready for chapter 2?  Find the book in our catalogue here.