5 - Elixirs

Summary

“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.