Does viscosity have a past? Health through Historical Semiotics
Jessica Hamel-Akré
The audience will leave with a renewed understanding of viscosity as both a historical and semiotic force shaping how we imagine health, appetite, and control. The talk reveals that viscosity was never just a physical property but a moral and cultural metaphor, originating in eighteenth-century medicine as a way to explain how emotion, diet, and the body’s fluids intertwined. By tracing this concept from the original diet doctor, Dr George Cheyne’s “glewy” body to contemporary wellness rhetoric, the presentation shows how our modern language of detoxing, cleansing, and “unblocking” health still carries the sticky residues of these older ideas.
Jessica Hamel-Akré
Dr. Jessica Hamel-Akré is an independent cultural strategy advisor and semiotician whose work explores how big ideas shape markets, institutions, and everyday life. In previous roles as a Research Director at Lovebrands Paris and at Gemic, she has led socio-cultural and semiotic research & strategy design across sectors including health, FMCG, media and entertainment, education, and automotive. Originally trained as a historian of ideas, she holds a PhD from the University of Montreal and served as a postdoctoral fellow and instructor in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Art of Not Eating: The Secret Origins of Diet Culture, a cultural history of modern dieting that traces how ideas about appetite, morality, and the body continue to structure contemporary health discourse.