The body was integrated into discussions of gambling, and luck was depicted as a tangible thing that the body could experience. In this chapter we look at the somatic effects of gambling and the ways that gambling marked the body in profound ways, considering the ways that gambling could disrupt bodily boundaries or throw them into confusion. We also consider the ways that luck, chance, and gambling were thought to have left their historical imprint on the human species, looking at the ways that social Darwinist and evolutionary thought wrestled with gambling and sought to understand its evolutionary meaning. Together, we consider how gambling could be understood as an intensely physical activity, rooted in the actions of the body.

Gambling in its modern form was invented in the nineteenth century. The resort casino, built in an environmentally or politically desirable location, attracted a wide range of people from around the world to an atmosphere of luxury, leisure, and cultural cultivation. Visitors to European casinos in the nineteenth century traveled there by steamship or by locomotive; they stayed in hotels and ate meticulously prepared foods; they listened to music performed by artists on tour; and caught up on global and regional affairs by reading newspapers from around the world. And they lost money in the gambling rooms. Built upon an existing network of health-conscious spa towns in the Rhineland, and then relocating to the Riviera in the 1860s, nineteenth-century casino life gave expression to bourgeois demands for leisure, luxury, and levity.