Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shall (eds). Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-19S0, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmiilan, 2010. Pp. xiii + 298. pound55. ISBN 978 0 230 23313 3.

摘要

It is not untypical for reviews of edited volumes to lament the somewhat uneven nature of the book, the solid quality of some contributions, the not-so-solid ones of others, and the perhaps well-intended, but not entirely successful effort of the editors in weaving it all together. The volume under review here would qualify for this kind of treatment, and perhaps not too surprisingly so for a book carrying two such notoriously difficult words in its name: 'neurology' and 'modernity'. Subtitled A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950, it brings together thirteen brief essays that trace the complex of scientific and cultural upheavals signalled by the book's title, and, as editors Salisbury and Shail write, how 'neurology became modernity's representative science of the body' (p. 33). While the latter proposition is certainly open to a great deal more proble-matisation than what Salisbury and Shail's otherwise useful introduction would seem to suggest (such perceptions testify, one is inclined to think, not least to our own fascination with all things 'neuro'), it has the definite virtue of focusing the volume firmly on a history of the (nervous) body. Individual chapters thus deal with topics ranging from the neurology of menstruation and nervous dyspepsia, to mechanic vibrations, (as deployed for therapeutic purposes) to the 'peristaltic subject'-all topics, though arguably neurological and modern in some way or another, one is very unlikely to encounter in the increasingly popular, brain-centric and not infrequently heroic writings that come labelled today as histories of neuroscience.