Risks and Benefits of Ice-Cold Drinks
On the Risks and Benefits
of Ice-Cold Drinks
Global Environments and the
Local Stakes of an Early Modern Medical Debate
Anna Speyart
3 December 2024 – 5 PM (CET)
The practice of chilling drinks with ice or snow in summer spread rapidly in sixteenth-century Europe, sparking a fierce debate in the medical republic of letters. From 1550 onward, physicians published dozens of treatises on the risks and benefits of chilled drinks. The treatises reveal that chilled consumption occupied an ambiguous place in the authors’ temporal and geographical imagination.
Contributors appealed to medical and literary authorities from antiquity to argue both in favor and against cold drinks. Though these classical references testified to the ancient pedigree of snow-cooled drinks, early modern authors regarded chilled consumptions as a distinctly new trend.
Authors also drew their arguments from comparisons with refrigeration habits in regions with climates warmer or colder than their own, including the Middle East, the Arctic, the New World, and every corner of Europe.
These comparative analyses factored the social, environmental, and infrastructural features of refrigeration at home and abroad to assess the effects of cold consumption.
By analyzing the rhetorical strategies in the cold drinking debate, this lecture shows that physicians used knowledge of global environments and transhistorical time to assess the locally practiced habit of everyday consumption.
About the Speaker ...
Anna Speyart is a PhD Candidate at Princeton University
Her research focuses on the history and philosophy of concepts, particularly those related to the physical body, nature, and life in ancient Greek and Roman texts. She explores the challenges these concepts pose for theorizing the subject and ethical and political agency. Additionally, she is interested in the reception of these ideas, especially in 20th and 21st-century continental philosophy, examining how communities interpret their connection to the Greco-Roman past. Her work aims to create new ways of relating that past to the present. She remains active in various interdisciplinary committees, including the Departments of Comparative Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the University Center for Human Values, and the Program in the History of Science.
