Stuart Justman, The Nocebo Effect: Overdiagnosis and Its Costs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. xi, 272, hardback, $79.99, ISBN: 987-1-137-52328-0.

donor of the organ more and more substituted in several contexts the recipient as the figure of reference. And a fundamental uneasiness facing modern medicine manifested itself behind the interests of self-determination. However, the history of organ transplantation is not a history of increasing biopower in Hofmann’s view. Since the 1980s it has been formed by a liberal form of power that saw the constitutive prerequisite and boundary in the liberty of the subject (p. 293). What I liked most is the beginning of the book with a ‘prologue’ about the scandal surrounding the first heart transplant in Switzerland in 1969. Also very interesting are Hofmann’s observations with regard to the ‘ideal donor’ and his reasoning about the moral economies of organ donation. The ideal donor condensed in the public discourse in the virtual figure of the young, healthy and male motorcyclist – ready to take risks. Unfortunately, readers cannot find a hint about the significance of its being a ‘male’ body. Although the book is worth reading by everyone interested in the cultural history of organ transplantation and the place of biomedicine at the end of the twentieth century, it is written in quite a schematic way with a lot of previews and flashbacks. It would have been worth thinking about integrating the three chapters into a more concise research question, which might also have helped to avoid the sometimes annoying switches in time. Readers hardly ever know – except in the prologue – where on the timeline they are. And while the Swiss case is very illustrative for the study of the subtle distinctions of organ donation discourses, the reasoning for just following the ‘Swiss Extra Train’ (‘Schweizer Extrazügli’, p. 47) is not that convincing. To finish with a detail (addressing the publisher): the quality of the pictures could have been better. Nevertheless, the book is enlivened by vivid quotations and to everyone interested in governmentality studies Hofmann’s book presents many precious insights that might change one’s views on submission, reification and commercialisation of physiological and political bodies.