technology and culture Book Reviews 237 his work might come out as wild as he thinks the situation actually is. David Rothenberg Dr. Rothenberg is the author of Hand s End: Technology and the Limits ofNature. He is assistant professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and editor of the new journal Terra Nova: Nature and Culture. Medicine and Western Civilization. Edited by DavidJ. Rothman, Steven Marcus, and Stephanie A. Kiceluk. New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni versity Press, 1995. Pp. xiii+442; illustrations, index. $50.00 (hard cover) $22.95 (paper). At long last we have a new collection of primary readings in Euro pean and American medicine, and it is a fine one. The editors are explicit about their work not being “a survey of the history of medi cine or a compendium of literary accounts of medicine.” Instead, they wish to present their readers with materials to “facilitate the analysis of critical conceptions in the ongoing dialogue between medicine and culture.” In the dialogue presented here, medicine has the louder voice, since the editors’ concern is with medicine both as a culture in itself and as “an integral and indispensable part of larger social cultures as well”; but they do select readings to illus trate the ways in which medicine and culture interact. Rothman et al. have therefore given us a very different kind of anthology than either Logan Clendening’s Source Book ofMedical History (New York and London: P. B. Hoeber, 1942) or Norman Cousins’s ThePhysician in Literature (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1982). Clendening excerpted from a large mass ofscientific medical writings, while Cousins chose from a few famous scientific and literary books. Instead, Rothman et al. set writings from a variety of genres cheek by jowl: biblical excerpts; ancient, medieval, and modern medical, scientific, and philosophical texts; autobiographical accounts; historical narratives; transcripts of hearings in the U.S. Senate; papal declarations; com mittee reports; fictional stories; and poetry. Their materials come from famous men and women, doctors and laypeople, Europeans and African Americans, those in power and the powerless. Almost every reading is powerful and provocative. And almost every one de serves to be readily available: one can find here excerpts from Aris totle, Mary PutnamJacobi, the Kinsey report, Kremer and Sprenger, Benjamin Rush, the Bible, Laennec, Koch, Chadwick, Montaigne, Frances Burney, and Philip Larkin. Reading these people together is a moving experience. To organize their materials, the authors have not chosen a chro nological framework but a topical one (although the items in each section are organized roughly from oldest to newest). The parts are 238 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE nine: the body divine (from biblical text to early modern saint); the body natural (from Greek treatises to Harvey); the body and destiny (from Aristotle through Freud and Masters andJohnson to a poem by W. D. Snodgrass); mind and body (from Hippocratic to Freudian, including the account of “Anna O”); disease and purity (from lep rosy to the germ theory); the healer (from Hippocratic Oath to Sara Lawrence Lightfoot); medical experimentation (from Jenner to Tuskegee); institutionalization and medicalization (from Pinel to Foucault); and pain, suffering and death (from preanesthetic mas tectomy to AIDS). Each reading is introduced with a paragraph es tablishing its background. There are a few minor errors in these introductions (Augustine as the Bishop of “Hatto” rather than Hippo, Marie “Zakrezewska” rather than Zakrzewska, for example), but I noted no substantial ones. Many fine black-and-white illustra tions (mainly from the iconographical collections of the Wellcome Institute) give the book further impact. One might ask whether this selection of readings shows the inter actions between medicine and culture in quite the way the authors’ introduction sets out; one might even ask if there is not a problem in essentializing the undefined categories of medicine and culture in the first place (perhaps one could ask for the plural forms, at least). The use of “civilization” in the title also harkens back to the earlier 20th century, with connotations of culture somewhat differ ent than the ethnographic ones specified in the introduction. Other reviewers might have equally churlish comments. But they would be beside the point. While choosing readings for an...