Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality, and: The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (review)

Conventional wisdom says that the moment of "the Body" has passed. Although scholars in a variety of disciplines pay their respects to Michel Foucault and the now decades-long trade in Body topics, they increasingly tend toward transnational identities, memory, the new political history, new media, and other nouveau subjects du jour. Yet historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary critics still write the Body, and academic presses still place bets on Body books.

Body Parts—a compilation of thirteen essays on bodybuilding, nudism, plastic surgery, racial typology, medical and nonmedical discourse, and sex, sex, sex—shows off the reach of current scholarship. David Horn's "Blood Will Tell" excavates a moment in the history of criminology when the emergent profession built a social and moral typology based on a person's tendency to blush (real criminals don't). Ivan Crozier's essay on "the anus of the Sodomite in nineteenth-century medical discourse" explores debates among venereologists, proctologists, and forensic pathologists over whether the anus could be read for signs of habitual buggery. In a more intellectual historical vein, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson's "Enlightened Hands" discusses how, in an age when "factory hands" were becoming increasingly important in British economic life, philosophers like Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and Erasmus Darwin debated the value and meaning of the hand and handwork in relation to intellectual work, social divisions of labor, and progress. Maren Möhring's essay, on the "physiological, aesthetic, and psychic dimensions of the skin" in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German nudism, describes nudism's affinities to, and dialogue with, other self-making discourses and practices, such as health advocacy and psychoanalysis, and critical political projects of the Left (scientific social engineering) and the Right (anti-Semitism): nudism was both a critique and a performance of modernity. Carolyn Ward Comiskey's piece, on a lawsuit involving surgery on a woman's calf in post–World War I France, narrates a key episode in the legitimation and consolidation of "chirurgie esthétique" as a field and profession.

Other essays deal with the breast, abdomen, rectum, pelvis, hair braids, sex-reassignment surgery, and muscles. Each focuses on a body part or procedure, a set of texts, a metaphoric chain, and/or a particular incident, which are connected to larger cultural trends, political conflicts, professional agendas. Some of the articles are undermined by a penchant for jargon, flippancy, overreaching, or a narrow focus; some are beautifully written and well contextualized. All of them are valuable—and most are quite wonderful.

In The Transparent Body, a "cultural analysis of medical imaging," José van Dijck follows in the wake of Barbara Maria Stafford, Lisa Cartwright, Bettyann Holtzmann-Kevles, and others. After an introduction on "mediated bodies and the ideal of transparency," the book takes on surgical movies, plastinated cadaver exhibitions, endoscopy, X rays, ultrasound, and virtual dissection. The richest chapter connects the representation of the body's interior in the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage to the invention of video endoscopy. There are also useful discussions of the politics of fetal imaging in the Netherlands, and the cultural meaning of the X ray in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

But van Dijck is not a historian, and her historical accounts tend to be derivative, unnuanced, or imprecise. For example, discussing the early reception of the X ray, she misses the playfulness of imaginative literature and cartooning, which comically exaggerated the powers of the new technology. She incorrectly situates the lab coat as an iconic emblem of medical expertise in the mid-nineteenth century—although her footnote cites a mid-twentieth-century source. And, too often, she makes strained connections between history and the present: "In...