| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Charles E. Rosenberg, editor. Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 236. $40.00.
Originating in an exhibit and conference on print culture and popular health sponsored by two of Philadelphia's surviving eighteenth-century institutions, the Library Company and the College of Physicians, this volume brings together nine essays on the contributions of print to the cultures of self-health. With the exception of William Helfand's informative chapter on the introduction into America in the 1830s of illustrated posters (those advertising proprietary medicines and health subjects comprising probably the largest single genre), the essays focus on texts—four of them on editions of particular books. And with the exception of Steven Shapin's chapter on the dietetic content of elite-serving books of manners in early modern England, the contributors concentrate on America. This includes Mary Fissell's careful untangling of the complicated different editions of the ubiquitous "female" advice book first published in Britain in 1684, Aristotle's Masterpiece, insofar as the circulation of this work among some of Rev. Jonathan Edwards younger parishioners in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1744 provides her with an illuminating case study of the blurring between the spoken and the written word in the making of eighteenth-century "vernacular body culture" (p. 78).	1
The long history of popular printed information on health and disease in America, editor Charles E. Rosenberg remarks in his introductory overview, stretches from the centuries-old self-improving works that some of the colonists brought with them, to today's plethora of publications filling the expansive "Health" sections of bookshops—to say nothing of what is now to be found on the Internet. This history of "inexhaustible demand for medical information" (p. 13) is one that can be seen to have embraced—and swiftly—every technological innovation in printing and media. But whether this technologically serviced demand constitutes "a pattern that has hardly changed" (p. 13), and whether its satisfaction forms a part of an "ineradicably human desire to predict and control one's biological future" (p. 13), is surely debatable, even without taking stock of what was not on the bookshop shelves during the golden age of Western medicine between penicillin and thalidomide.	2
This kind of transcendent resort to human nature is hardly qualified by the volume's other essays, most of which, in one way or another, confirm the importance of sociopolitical contexts and religion, race, class, and gender in particular for understanding how such health information was fashioned and deployed. This is strikingly revealed in the contrasting production and shelf-lives of two hugely popular sex manuals—Esoteric Anthropology (1853), by the libertarian health reformer Thomas Nichols, and the hysterically antimasturbatory Plain Facts about Sexual Life (1877), by the enema-loving, Seventh-Day Adventist John Harvey ("Cornflakes") Kellogg—that are the focus, respectively, of chapters by Jean Silver-Isenstadt and Ronald Numbers. More subtly it is brought out by Kathleen Brown's analysis of the first child-care manual to be written and published in the United States (which was also one of the earliest American health guides, and the first to be penned by an American woman). Mary Tyler's The Maternal Physician (1811) reflected many of the features of an older receipt-book tradition, and much of its textual authority was constructed through reference to European sources. But it also bears the impress (and ambivalences) of postindependence thinking, not least in relation to the role of women in child rearing and family making in the new republic. Centered on the moral and sexually laden category of cleanliness, Tyler's book can be seen as tacking a course that was no less antipathetic to the dandified habits of the Old World European gentlemen than to the discipline-resisting American revolutionary soldiers who, refusing to obey latrine regulations, sweep out their tents, or wash their linen (women's work), became the objects of civilian and military scorn. Thus there is more than meets the eye in Tyler's insistence on the daily bathing of infants in cold water, or the need to provide them with ample breast milk and clean linens; at least in part, we are witness to women's changing relationship to male medical authority, including women's "changing embodiment of that authority" (p. 107).	. . .

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