Corpulency. Medical concepts, images and metaphors from 1500 to 1900

这个项目旨在分析医学作家和普通人用来描述和理解肥胖的概念、图像和隐喻的长期发展。它将从这样一个假设开始：关于肥胖的性质、成因和危险的更严格的医学观念，以及用来描述肥胖的术语、图像和隐喻，在所考虑的时期发生了深刻的变化。据推测，这一过程是由关于身体及其疾病的新理论以及美学（例如苗条身体的新理想）、道德（例如暴食是致命的罪恶）和社会（例如肥胖是富裕的标志）规范和理想的变化所推动的，而这些规范和理想又得到了医生将肥胖视为病理状态的日益增长的趋势的支持。分析将侧重于德语区。它将侧重于学术、科学文本和越来越多的普及医学著作（健康咨询书籍、百科全书、水疗广告等）。处理肥胖症及其危害。这一分析将通过对肥胖者不断变化的视觉表征的研究来补充，并基于数字化文本的样本，通过对非医学背景下肥胖身体周围的图像和隐喻的分析来补充。

This project aims at an analysis of the long-term developments in the concepts, images and metaphors which medical writers and ordinary people used to describe and understand corpulency. It will start from the hypothesis that the more strictly medical ideas about the nature, genesis and dangers of corpulency as well as the terms, images and metaphors used to describe it, were subject to profound changes in the period under consideration. Presumably, this process was prompted by new theories of the body and its diseases as well as by changes in aesthetic (e.g. the new ideal of the slim body), moral (e.g. gluttony as a deadly sin) and social (e.g. corpulency as a sign of affluence) norms and ideals, which were supported, in turn, by an increasing trend among physician to treat corpulency as a pathological state. The analysis will focus on the German speaking territories. It will focus on learned, scientific texts and the growing bulk of popularizing medical writings (health advice books, encyclopedias, advertisements for spas etc.) dealing with corpulency/obesity and its hazards. This analysis will by complemented by a look at changing visual representations of corpulent persons and, based on a sample of digitalized texts, by an analysis of the images and metaphors which surrounded the corpulent body in non-medical contexts.