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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78.2 (2004) 526-527



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Paolo Palladino. Plants, Patients, and the Historian: (Re)membering in the Age of Genetic Engineering. Encounters: Cultural Histories. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. ix + 250 pp. Ill. $65.00 (cloth, 0-8135-3237-X), $30.00 (paperbound, 0-8135-3238-8).

Genetics reshaped biology in the twentieth century. Paolo Palladino's historical concern in this book is to examine that redefining impact on agriculture and medicine in Britain. There are parallel concerns and tensions as practical workers—plant breeders and clinicians alike— defend their disciplines from the unrelenting juggernaut of the laboratory workers. Thus, when Sir Rowland Biffen speaks as the first Cambridge professor of agriculture for the new genetics, the opposition he faces from John Percival from the University of Reading and Edwin Sloper Beaven, a plant breeder in the malting and brewing industry, finds echoes in the complaints of that the surgeon Percy Lockhart Mummery raised about the work of Georgiana Bonser who developed strains of inbred mice to study cancer. The particular conditions—of unique crops, of individual patients—matter. But this is anything but a Whiggish history—quite the contrary; so, for example, Lockhart Mummery was as interested in modernizing the science of cancer, albeit clinically, as was his laboratory-based critic Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins.

Yet, as fascinating as these parallel stories are, both individually and in juxtaposition to one another, they serve primarily as the frame for a historiographical meditation. This volume is the second in Rutgers University Press's series "Encounters," which aims to "demonstrate that history is the hidden narrative of modernity" (p. ii). Like the other authors of the series, Palladino engages the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and many others. Thus, to illustrate these influences, he explains his subtitle: "The disaggregation of the word 'remembering' signals my interest in the role of the archive in historiography, [End Page 526] the professional practice of connecting the present and past actions and events" (p. 2). Remembering, then, is not simply a process of memory, but also member-ing, configuring, again.

This theoretical approach makes the historian in general, often Palladino himself in particular, as much what the book is about as the plants and the patients. Authorial self-consciousness can be a useful antidote to the false impartiality of so-called objective history, but it can also set up a hall of mirrors that traps reader and writer alike in a loop of reflexivity. Historians in their archives, Palladino suggests, can perhaps be like genetic engineers with their genome maps, so readers should be as careful as we citizens should be of our food in an era of genetically modified foods. Analogies are seductive and, at their best, suggestive; their power is precisely in their imprecision. I find this analogy, though, very theory-driven and sketchy; I would prefer a closer examination of the practical similarities and, as importantly, differences between archives and genome sequences. Discussion of these particular facts, if they supported the analogy, would in turn be a contribution to the development of theory. At its most effective—in the conclusion to chapter 3, for example—theory serves as a seasoning that heightens the discussion of agricultural genetics without swamping it, providing enough historical detail to illustrate the theoretical points in action.

In his acknowledgments (pp. vii-viii), the author refers his readers to several of his articles dating back to 1990 for more detail, suggesting that the current work is a synthesis of those essays. The synthesis is not entirely seamless, for there are problems with repetition and continuity as if the original papers were only lightly edited to form individual chapters. Still, as that body of work suggests, Paolo Palladino has thought at some depth about plants and patients in the age of genetics and has earned the right to reflect on what that means for the practice of history.


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