The Disordered Body: Epidemic Disease and Cultural Transformation (review)

Abstract

Readers should turn to the last chapter of this book first. From that chapter, "Corporeal Catastrophe: Bodies 'Crash' and Disappear," the millenarian framing that Suzanne E. Hatty and James Hatty have elected for their review of leprosy, plague, and syphilis in medieval and early modern Europe unfolds. Publishing just before the year 2000, Hatty and Hatty heard loudest the voices of those concerned with imminent doom. They heard both religious apocalyptical fears and secular worries of emergent infectious diseases, of the demise of national populations from HIV/AIDS, of the ethically problematic translation of human bodies by and into machines, and even of the disappearance of other animal species on the planet foreshadowing our own undoing. Without that chapter in [End Page 125] mind, many historians of medicine may look for argument and historical analysis based on the promises of the first chapter, "Imaging the Body." Hatty and Hatty boldly assert there that "disordered" bodies were the dominant feature of great epidemics, and that the historical sequence and the pathological characteristics of three very different human epidemic diseases during the period from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries led Western thinking about "the body" to a great ideological watershed, the Cartesian separation of mind and body. The central problem with this interesting book is its failure to attend to the diachronic "how" that such an assertion demands. The central flaw of the volume--once we forgive an understandable attempt to reach a very broad general audience with juicy examples from cultural studies--is the authors' tendency to substitute assertions and illustrative quotations for the tougher work of proof and analysis.