What my liver, what it has my liver? I.e. in these times charged with chocolate rabbits, lamb and cubis family which celebrated the Pascale joy, it is felt a little. Bilious attack? A tough concept in France, which one does not find in any handbook of pathology, French or foreigner, wrote Michel Serres in the Eighties, who devoted a study to this body and his symbolic system. The liver conveys as well things as it obliges, written Marie-Christine Pouchelle, anthropologist, researcher at CNRS and author of the Bilious attack: a French affection (1), “to resort to the anthropology of medicine and diseases, but also with psyché of the women, sexuality, the whole of our social and cultural history”. With the religion, too. Organic and nonexhaustive walk in the middle (if statement is dared) symbol.

Anglo-Saxons the poilade. Once more, they do not lose an occasion to cover us the ridiculous one, as in the world being only suffered from this mythical bilious attack. So much so that a report written with the FAC of Boston in 1992 concludes that the “fascination of the French for the liver would be due so that the latter, in their sufficiency, intuitively saw in the body of the sanguinification, regulator of the interior medium, strengthened barrier and désintoxicante of the body, the reflection of France: overworked body, threatened, fragile, but ô how much important”. And thus go…

Esthetics In the Twenties, the thinness any more that of the size and the liver is not strangled in the corset. And it is at the time of this release that occurs the great time of the bilious attack. Rather than the crisis of hysteria, the bilious attack gives to the women privileged classes, per hour of stammering feminism, a means of expression less stigmatizing, enabling them to play on the registers food, climatic, emotional…

Would gastronomy the Anglo-Saxon irony be registered in the dispute which opposes the two countries on the plans culinary and political? France wants to make the gastronomical matter law as she wanted to reign on all Europe. On a side, the “not-kitchen” English, without fat and of water, just good for the hepatic ones, we think. On the other side of the English Channel, an English pleasure to imagine the sick French of their large puffs out, paying their taste of nauséeuses foods, cut down and other repugnant tricks like snails or frogs.

Does Latin the liver hold more place in the Latin countries, because catholic? The confession of the sins to the priests supported the idea of the purging of moods, of exorcism. What would be then in background of the cures at a watering-place and the purification. France, girl elder of the Church, is defined by the pleasures of the table, contrary to the Church victorienne. The bilious attack necessitates periods of purging, penitence, insulation.

Social backgrounds the middle class and higher are mainly affected by the bilious attack, they which do not risk the shortage. Only the most fortunate layers of the population go to the water, recommended for the fragile livers (that it is of good tone to have). The fortune of the bilious attack was undoubtedly due to some extent to that of these thermal spas to the mode, intense hearths of social and political life.

Zut In fact of eternal suffering, the eternal question: the liver, on the right or on the left?

(1) Review Grounds, February 2007.