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Despite our medical advances, the gut continues to be a source of both fascination and mystery.

It is an organ of the body which has resisted medical authority in interesting ways.

It's Monday, November 18th, and you're listening to Science Friday.

I'm sci-fi producer Shoshana Bucksbaum.

You're likely familiar with the guts microbiome, that constellation of trillions of microbes thriving

inside of our bodies, and that our stomachs have some of the same neuroreceptors as our brains,

a second brain, so to speak, and that gut feeling, it's, well, impossible to ignore.

A new book explores not only how the scientific understanding of the gut has changed over time,

but also its cultural significance. Here's Ira with more.

Dr. Elsa Richardson is author of Rumbles, the curious history of the gut. She's the co-director of the

Center for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at Strathclyde University based in Glasgow,

Scotland. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me on, Ira. In the book,

you write about not just the medical history of the gut, also its cultural history.

How have the metaphors we use to describe the gut shaped our understanding of it?

Well, I think that's what really got me interested in the gut as a topic.

So I'm a medical historian by training, but my interest tends to lie in where medicine and ideas about health

sit in culture. And what I noticed when I was looking into the history of digestion and looking

into the history of diet was how dramatically the metaphors we have used to describe,

think about our stomachs have changed over time. So my area of

specialism is the 19th century, 19th century British history. And one thing that I

found really odd in a way was the way that the metaphors then that attach

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