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  • Medicine, Emotion, and Disease, 1700-1950
  • Peter N. Stearns
Fay Bound Alberti , ed. Medicine, Emotion, and Disease, 1700-1950. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. xxviii + 196 pp. $69.95 (ISBN-10: 1-4039-8537-5; ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-8537-8).

This is an interesting collection, obviously focused on several topics at the intersection between medicine and medical research and emotion. The book is well framed, with an introduction that suggests key contours of study in the history of emotion per se, with emphasis on changing emotional standards and their role in the construction of emotional experiences and responses. Medicine ties in closely to this more general approach. The collection is ambitious, in that it ranges from early modern theories of emotion in relation to the body, to research on emotion toward the end of the nineteenth century, to discussions of the role of emotion in doctor-patient interactions. Most of the material is British—but there is a broader context, and a final essay focuses mainly on Continental research on schizophrenia. [End Page 195]

Because of the extensive range, and the considerable time period envisaged (though coverage ends a bit before 1950), the volume as a whole does not entirely cohere. It is best to approach it in terms of clusters of essays, and most of the clusters are quite informative, with the individual entries usefully reinforcing each other.

Two combinations work particularly well. Articles by the editor and by Thomas Dixon explore traditional medical and philosophical thinking about emotion, and emotion's role in health and society; and the Dixon essay goes on to posit the eighteenth century as a crucial turning point in this whole area, with a shift from the customary emphasis on the passions to a newer delineation of emotion. This is important stuff, very well stated. An ensuing essay on puerperal insanity in the nineteenth century links to some extent, and adds to our understanding of the role of gender in emotional formulations during the century.

The second grouping, chapters 5 and 6, focuses on experimentation relevant to emotion around 1900. The first of these articles emphasizes physical experiments that generated and reflected medical findings about emotion. Otniel Dror (dealing with researchers from the United States to Russia) follows with more-general considerations about emotion research in the wake of Darwinian ideas about the evolutionary functions of emotion, with attention to (among other things) boundaries and tensions between medicine and psychiatry.

Other articles, if less linked, are solid for the most part. The discussion of clinical assessments of schizophrenia in the early twentieth century is carefully done. Rhodri Hayward's analysis of changes in the evaluation of emotions in patient relationships in early twentieth-century Britain breaks important new ground, showing how new ideas about emotion transformed approaches in primary care as well. I found the article on emotion and nineteenth-century humanitarianism less useful, because it covers somewhat familiar ground (dealing with the emergence of more-explicit empathy) and offers a surprisingly brief treatment of an important social topic.

This is a book that deserves a wide audience—among researchers on the history of medicine, adepts in cultural studies, and students of psychology. Attention to the role of emotion in medical practice, seen as a historical subject, and to the growing inclusion of emotion as part of the province of scientific research, is significantly advanced by the essays in this collection.

Peter N. Stearns
George Mason University
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