Emm Barnes Johnstone with Joanna Baines, The Changing Faces of Childhood Cancer: Clinical and Cultural Visions since 1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. ix, 236, £60, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-4039-8801-0.

pandemic not because it's been 'forgotten' or somehow 'repressed' (though cf. p. 226), but because its epidemic nature emerged as a function of the very system designed to protect us from it. The Changing Faces of Childhood Cancer makes several fascinating and important contributions to the fields of medical history, modern British studies, the history of childhood, and medical ethics, among others. The book emerged from a Wellcome Trust grant about the history of cancer research and services in Britain since 1945 and is published within the Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History series. In many ways, the cultural and clinical histories of childhood cancer are stories of progress, success, and triumph. From the 1930s until the present day, childhood cancer has moved from a 'hidden disease of which a few doctors had little knowledge, to a research hotspot, generously funded by governments and charities' (11). Survival rates have greatly improved from around 30% forty years ago to over 70% today (182). The book illuminates and explores many interlocking factors underlying the improved treatment of childhood cancer. On the medical side, there were transnational collaborations between small teams of researchers; the centralisation of resources; the coming together of a new discipline, paediatric oncology; and the development of clinical trials. The authors underline the potential and significance of individual and disparate medical 'pioneers', and the 'enormous transformative effects that even small research groups may have' on clinical research (185). More broadly, progress in this area was also contingent on the raising of funds by government bodies, media, and charities both big and small (from the Teesside Leukaemia Fund to the British Empire Cancer Campaign). The book argues that this British story is unique, in terms of medical systems, specialisation, and the interaction between disciplines, but the authors also describe great regional and local variations in the 'British story', and situate their analysis internationally, in relation to ideas imported from America and continental Europe and, notably, the 'tumour safari' of the surgeon Denis Burkitt across Uganda. The authors tease out moments of professional, clinical, and ethical tension which complicate a narrative of improvement in the identification, diagnosis, and treatment of childhood cancer. Whilst acknowledging that the development of cooperative clinical groups and their first clinical trials, for example, may in retrospect appear to have 'an impressive orderliness', Barnes Johnstone and Baines highlight the 'frustration and exhaustion' of clinicians involved (54). The …