Medicine in the twentieth century

Forty-six chapters plus a substantial introduction, fifty-one contributors, 745 pages of packed text (with surprisingly little repetition)-Medicine in the twentieth century is indeed a formidably determined attempt to encompass a very complex period in medical history. Its editors have been, furthermore, ambitious in more than mere scale. The book is divided into three long sections whose titles, 'Power', 'Bodies' and 'Experiences', signal their aspirations toward late-century historiographical sophistication. The structure of the book, moreover, cleverly parallels the changes that its text documents. Given the probability that only dutiful book reviewers can be depended upon to read every line, perhaps some advice as to how to navigate through this mighty tome might be welcome. My suggestion is-don't start with the Introduction or with Chapter 1. Retrace the century's own trajectory from triumphant modernity to post-modern uncertainty and relativism by beginning at Chapter 2, 'The golden age' (by Allan Brandt and Martha Gardner), and moving on through the first section to Rudolf Klein on 'The crises of the welfare states' and Stuart Blume's carefully poised survey of the problematic impacts of medical technology. A pause, at this point, is recommended-to revise your ideology before tackling the major 'Bodies' section. If the first section is substantially predicated upon the Old Left's conviction that politics is essentially economics, then the second section exemplifies the New Left's credo that "the personal is the political". Here, moreover, post-modern fragmentation of the individual is taken some distance towards its logical conclusion. In total, eighteen different 'Bodies' are identified and discussed, ranging from the 'Healthy body' (Dorothy Porter) through the 'Temporal body' (Armstrong in typically stimulating and quirky form), the 'Sexual body' (Lesley Hall), the 'Reproductive body' (Naomi Pfeffer) and on to the 'Diseased body' (David Cantor) and the 'Disabled body' (Roger Cooter), finishing, appropriately enough, with the 'Dead body' (also Cooter). In the middle of this section, there is a particularly interesting triptych on the 'Psychological', 'Psychoanalytical' and 'Psychiatric' bodies (Mathew Thomson, Sonu Shamdasani and Mark Micale, respectively). At this point, 'Mental illness' (Joan Busfield), in the following section, merits a detour. Read together, these four articles provide a very comprehensive introduction to the historiography of twentieth-century psychiatric medicine. The 'Experiences' section starts with 'Media' (Susan Lederer and Naomi Rogers), a concise survey of how doctors have been portrayed in those characteristic twentieth-century novelties, film and television. One might be tempted to suspect the editors here of some subtle hint at a post-post-modern reflective turn in their ordering of the essays. Thus, after much peering into different sorts of bodies, we have a unified narrative of the body looking back. But perhaps they wished simply to refresh us after the long haul of the middle section, for 'Media' is, no pun intended, marvellously entertaining. Among much else, Lederer and Rogers aptly illustrate the century's long march from deference. In the 1930s, for example, the British film censors were able to prevent a proposed filming of Bernard Shaw's The doctor's dilemma on the grounds that it might "shake the confidence of the nation in the medical profession". Sixty years on, oddly enough, doctors now complain that the popular television show