Goldstein, Jan. Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The of Nanette Leroux. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Pp. xi + 246. ISBN: 978-0-691-01186-8 Scholars of French medical history are familiar with Jan Goldstein's classic volume, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 1987). Goldstein's recent book, Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The of Nanette Leroux, takes on a more specific subject: the case history of a young Savoyard peasant woman, the pseudonymous Nanette Leroux of the title. Nanette never would have been remembered had she not fallen ill, at eighteen, with a variety of nervous symptoms, including convulsions, lethargy, and catalepsy. Her psychosomatic ailments, sparked by some unwanted sexual advances by a local rural policeman, began in 18zz and lasted three years. She was treated as a charity patient by an established local doctor--the medical director of nearby Aix Les Bains, Charles-Humbert-Antoine Despine (1777-1852)--as well as, indirectly, by a younger and promising specialist from Paris, Alexandre Bertrand 0795-1831). Today's readers, familiar with the concept of repression and its gendered bond with hysteria, recognize the blatantly sexual underpinnings of Nanette's symptoms. It is Goldstein's contention, however, that Despine and Bertrand could not see the sexual nature of the case: they did not have access to our own sexualized interpretation of trauma because this type of hermeneutic became pervasive much later in the century. The book includes eleven illustrations and two maps, and is divided into two parts. The first consists of four interpretive chapters, together forming an exquisite micro-history of mental illness in nineteenth-century Savoy. Chapter One, Preliminaries, introduces the two authors of the case--Doctors Despine and Betrand--and provides a plot summary of their account. Bertrand compiled the text on the basis of Despine's journal: he probably never met either Despine or Nanette herself. Despine and Betrand shared a passion for treatments such as hydrotherapy and animal magnetism, the precursor of hypnosis. Goldstein also introduces Nanette, the protagonist: a feisty young woman, Nanette is not the pliable and passive patient so common in nineteenth-century case histories. Indeed, it is Goldstein's contention that, in the end, Nanette cured herself; this, along with her request for a watch as a gift, and the fact that her illness was precipitated by a sexually motivated aggression, form according to Goldstein the three most important features of the case. The second chapter, Contexts, carefully explores some of the cultural and historical backgrounds of the case: Savoy under the oppressive politics of Piedmontese Restoration (1814-1860)--and especially the institution of the garde champetre, the rural law-enforcer who often took advantage of his position (as one did with Nanette); bourgeois spa culture in nearby Aix-les Bains; nascent consumerism, of which Nanette was keenly aware despite her limited economic ability to participate in it; the diagnoses of catalepsy and hysteria, still gender-neutral and not yet eroticized by the medical profession in general or by Despine and Bertrand in particular; the prevalence of spectacle in the practice of medicine; the scientific networks that allowed Despine and Bertrand to collaborate; the noteworthy absence of relevant religious content in the Leroux case; Despine's relationship with his own wife, whose willfulness and independence of mind mirrored, according to Goldstein, Nanette's own (in the repetition of this female rebellion, Goldstein reads the signs of strain to the prevalent patriarchal system). In the third chapter, Making Sense of the Case Goldstein begins with a Freudian understanding of Nanette's illness: a sexual trauma that brought on hysterical symptoms. None of Nanette's contemporaries, however, understood the case this way, attributing instead Nanette's ailments to the fright she experienced with the garde champetre. …