Book Review

摘要

This volume addresses what has become in recent years an important subject in the history of medicine: the patient. A quarter of a century after Roy Porter’s plea for a medical ‘history from below’ focusing on patients, the editors tackle this ‘curiously underwritten’ (p. 6) history. The value of this volume for illuminating this topic is in part due to the fact that it takes as its subject the patient. In their introduction, which offers a nuanced discussion of the scholarship on the patient in medical history and will be useful in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on the history of medicine, Casper and Jacyna suggest that the neurological patient is not only ‘highly representative of all medical patients’ (p. 10), but also seems to magnify certain central aspects of patienthood. But while ‘neurological’, the emphasis is clearly on ‘patient’; the volume is marked by the absence of brain talk which, as Max Stadler notes in his intelligent commentary, opens up the space to think about patients and the medical encounter in all their historical richness, to emphasise ‘bodily expression and performance… of the theatrical and ritualistic in the lives of the neurological patient’ (p. 228).