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

Suzanne E. Hatty and James Hatty. The Disordered Body: Epidemic Disease and Cultural Transformation. SUNY Series in Medical Anthropology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. v + 362 pp. $57.50 (cloth, 0-7914-4365-5), $18.95 (paperbound, 0-7914-4366-3).

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 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.

The chapter that Hatty and Hatty elected to use as an opening framework displays their ease with sociological views of body and disease, and their premise that perceptions of gender are fundamental to all study of the human body, past or present. Such disciplinary orientation is not standard fare in historical epidemiology, or in the medical history of disease and epidemics in medieval and early modern Europe. It is also uncomfortably positioned alongside the abundant literature that sees the impact of epidemics and social controls as far better reflecting class and socioeconomic status than gender. Hatty and Hatty simply accept a governing perspective from within feminism and sociology, and so have little interest in dismantling the stances that others may take with equal conviction. The "given" of their argument is important: epidemic diseases such as leprosy, bubonic plague, and syphilis affected men and women; the gendered language of contemporary descriptions cannot be dismissed as unimportant. Their claim is that many previous studies have failed to address "the historical significance of the available evidence" (p. 27) when summarizing the community responses to epidemics of these three diseases.

Alas, in two sections of the study the authors themselves have failed to find all of the available evidence. Their retrieval of information on leprosy is quite limited, relying heavily on materials cited in relatively recent overviews of medieval sexuality. As elsewhere in the book, the Hattys borrow from Frederick Cartwright's Social History of Medicine and Charles E.-A. Winslow's Conquest of Epidemic Diseases to set their general argument about the periodization and manifestations of leprosy, plague, and syphilis. Hence they have missed most of the specialized studies on medieval leprosy published within the last half-century, including works in medical history as well as important social history treatments such as R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society. In other words, Hatty and Hatty have selected evidence available from the kinds of recent secondary literature that shares their stance about the past--as perhaps we all do. The section on syphilis...