American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within

American Disgust shows how perceptions of disgust and fears of contamination are rooted in the country's history of colonialism and racism. Drawing on colonial, corporate, and medical archives, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer argues that microbial medicine is closely entwined with changing cultural experiences of digestion, excrement, and disgust that are inextricably tied to the creation of whiteness.



Ranging from nineteenth-century colonial encounters with Native people to John Harvey Kellogg's idea...