Origin of 'intestinal fortitude'

[Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker]

I first heard this phrase in the mid 70s. Any clues on earlier use?

[InternetLegend]

I found three cites that attribute its coinage to Dr. John Wilce, a football coach and professor of clinical medicine at Ohio State University. Wikipedia (I know, I know, but bear with me) dates its first public use to a lecture he gave in 1916; in his paper, “Jacques and the Fat Man: Physical Culture and the Abdomen in Modern France” (warning - PDF file), Christopher Forth, of the Australian National University, cites its first use “by John Wilce sometime after 1913”, and in American Speech, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Oct., 1955), Tom Burns Haber said, “the euphemism has been in existence for about four decades”, which would place its first use around 1915.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

From Wiki

John Woodworth Wilce (May 12, 1888 — May 17, 1963) was a coach of American football at the Ohio State University, a physician, and a university professor…

Wilce’s “combination of medicine and football,” and a sense of propriety that reflected his English heritage and led him to try to reform the speech of his players on and off the field, led him to coin the phrase “intestinal fortitude.” Haber (1955) records the story of the coinage—the idea first coming to Dr. Wilce on the way to the lecture he was about to present on anatomy and physiology at Ohio State in 1916, his first use of the phrase in public (in a lecture to his team), and how he began to hear the phrase used by others.

The Origin of ‘Intestinal Fortitude’ Tom Burns Haber
American Speech, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Oct., 1955), pp. 235-237

samclem may have access to the complete article.

[Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker]

Hmm. . . much earlier than I would have expected. Thanks.

[samclem]

I think the others have pretty well nailed it. The only thing I can add is that it starts to get into the popular newspapers only around 1926-28.

[si_blakely]

I use the phrase intestinal fortitude as a less vulgar form of the word guts, in the sense of courage, bravery.

How much older is guts in this sense than intestinal fortitude?

Si

[panache45]

@si_blakely

I use the phrase intestinal fortitude as a less vulgar form of the word guts, in the sense of courage, bravery.

How much older is guts in this sense than intestinal fortitude?

Si

That’s the way I’ve always heard it, as a euphemism for “guts,” when the context calls for a term less colloquial or vulgar.

[Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker]

@si_blakely

I use the phrase intestinal fortitude as a less vulgar form of the word guts, in the sense of courage, bravery.

How much older is guts in this sense than intestinal fortitude?

Si

I don’t have my OED onhand, but Etymology Online attests it from 1893. While not the gospel, they’re usually pretty good.

[samclem]

@si_blakely

I use the phrase intestinal fortitude as a less vulgar form of the word guts, in the sense of courage, bravery.

How much older is guts in this sense than intestinal fortitude?

Si

“Guts” to mean intestinal fortitude is only cited from the 1890’s. It wasn’t a polite word in the Victorian Era, so it didn’t get used in print much.

Here’s a post from over at the American Dialect Society Mailing LIst.

Yes, “guts” used to be considered coarse. Here’s an illustrative quotation from Richard Grant White, A Desultory Denunciation of English Dictionaries, in The Galaxy (1869), via Cornell University Making of America:
<<Vulgarity is no more a justification of the omission of any English word than obsoleteness. Dictionaries are mere books of reference, made to be consulted, not to be read. In the bear-baiting days of Queen Elizabeth it might be said without offence of a vile, dull man, that he was “not fit to carry guts to a bear.” Now-a-days a man who used, in general society, the simple English word for which some New England “females” elegantly substitute innards, would be looked upon with horror. But this is no good reason for the omission of the word from a dictionary.>>