A Möbius strip. Fin-de-siècle neuropsychiatry and Paul Möbius

The way ahead is shown by the last essay in the book, Karl Figlio's meaty piece of social history, 'How does illness mediate social relations? Workmen's compensation and medico-legal practice, 1890-1940'. The title is spot-on, and highlights the paper's concerns and approaches. Taking the eye malfunction, nystagmus, Figlio shows that late nineteenth-century medical interest in its exact specification, symptoms, aetiology, duration, and severity arose specifically because it was one of the compensatable industrial diseases under the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1897. Moreover, the vast ensuing controversy concerning the reality and discovery of malingering amongst miners then helped to constitute the socio-scientific framework within which the very field of psychosomatic and psychiatric medicine could be defined in the twentieth century (shell-shock treatment after World War I is a parallel example). Figlio's socialhistorical skill in tracing the dialectic of the construction of knowledge forms, their social use, the emergence of new problems, and the negotiation of matching new intellectual formulations, scores a last-minute winner for the social constructionist approach, and vindicates the project of the book. If the Edinburgh University Press must charge £12.00 for a paperback, they should take more care over the proof-reading (e.g. Michael Foucault crops up disconcertingly often). Roy Porter Wellcome Institute