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Goethe Yearbook 195 ideal of harmonious complementarity. Goethe's ideal of natural does not insist upon specific roles for men and women (as we see, for example, in Schiller's "Würde der Frauen"), but represents gender as only one Ui a vast web of oppositions that are in constant flux. Without these dynamic oppositions the living organism we know as the universe would cease to reproduce, intensify, and progress. Faust would be left sitting in the static confines of his gothic study. As my brief overview suggests, Tantillo's highly readable and insightful book does not simply explicate pieces of Goethe's Naturphilosophie, but teUs a story that fits the necessary parts of the dynamic philosophy into a whole, providing a framework that helps us see the larger picture of nature as Goethe attempted to grasp it. She also sets Goethe in the context of his contemporaries , within the struggles to define science in the early nineteenth century, which is extremely useful for anyone interested in the history of science in the romantic period generally. AU quotations from the German are translated, making it a valuable book for graduate students or literary scholars who do not have German. No explication of Goethe's science, no matter how dynamic in its own right, is likely to convince us that his scientific writings are his greatest gift us, Uving two centuries later. Tantillo's book, however, goes a long way to help us to see why Goethe would make this claim, why he would see his literary work as only a part of a much larger project to convince humanity that we dweU in a living, breathing, and ever-changing universe that holds us aU in its dynamic web. The Colorado College William S. Davis Robert D. Tobin, Doctor's Orders: Goethe and Enlightenment Thought. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell UP, 2001.255 pp. Robert Tobin offers a reading in nine chapters of Goethe's WUhelm Meister through the lens of eighteenth-century medical developments, including —nay, emphasizing—mental health. Beginning with a survey of Goethe's knowledge of medicine, he then progresses to a review of the mind-body problem Ui phüosophy that led to a privUeging of the body (Chapter 2). Next comes an introduction to the novel's reception and the various forms of medical constructs of illness in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Chapter 3), followed in order by an assessment of the reasons for the rise of physicians to prominence in the late eighteenth century (Chapter 4), an examination of the renditions of rapture and melancholy in the novel (Chapter 5), prescribed medical cures (Chapter 6), the healing of WilheUn's physical and psychological wounds (Chapter 7), WUhelm's overcoming of homoerotic tendencies in his education for masculinity (Chapter 8), and a theorizing of the heterosexual famUy as the bourgeois ideal (Chapter 9). In his conclusion Tobin endeavors to draw the strains of his argument together in a cogent summary. Tobin grounds his argument Ui the belief that the rise of medicine coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie (7). Indeed, he makes a compelling case for this view in his opening chapter. The subsequent stages of analysis are consistently framed by the (evolving) medical thought of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Throughout this fine example of interdisciplinary German studies, the argument is broadly framed, richly documented, and 196 Book Reviews mostly well written.The thUty-two pages of closely printed endnotes read Uke a running commentary of primary eighteenth-century sources and subsequent scholarship. Tobin judiciously reminds the reader at strategic points of Goethe's extensive knowledge of medical views on the nature of Ulness, the appropriate cures, and homosexuality as an "Ulness." The reader wUl appreciate the many new insights the author provides into the Apprenticeship. One of the most successful chapters is that on cross-dressing and homosexuality (chapter 8), where he discusses the "semiotics and didactics of drag" (153). But then, Tobin has written extensively on the topic previously in Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and The Age of Goethe (2000). In Doctor's Orders queer theory is positioned alongside other aspects of the medical discourses of the era. References to the Wanderjahre aie...

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