| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Carolyn Thomas de la Peña. The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. (American History and Culture.) New York: New York University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 329. $35.00.

In this engaging and well-written study Carolyn Thomas de la Peña offers a detailed cultural history of the medical-technological interface in the period 1850–1940, and in so doing tells us a great deal about how the body and its relation to modernity were conceived. As she shows, the body's energies were understood in terms of two central groups of ideas: those relating to blockage and flow (aiming at the release of energies), and those relating to energy levels (aiming at the replenishment of energy or the stimulation of fresh energies). In both cases, the underlying notion was a return to the "natural" body, technologically reproduced by various devices and cures.

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