| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David Serlin. Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Pp. 244. $25.00.
David Serlin's book is a stimulating reflection on the cultural implications of modifications to the human body made possible by medical developments after World War II. Synthesizing an impressive array of secondary commentary and drawing on media, popular sources, and some institutional documentation, Serlin parses understandings of gender, class, normalcy, disability, and patriotism in four distinct essays or "allegories." Together they suggest that, ultimately, technologies offered to liberate bodies from disabilities both physical and psychological—part of the perquisites of the postwar liberal society—supported conformities idiomatic of the era. An epilogue reflects on an Andy Warhol exhibit presaging an era of new norms for engineering the body.	1
Serlin's essay, "The Other Arms Race," considers new prosthetic designs rising concomitantly with technologies developed to protect and defend national interests. He concludes that heterosexual masculinity and "citizenship" were operative concepts in rehabilitation paradigms targeting amputee veterans. Prosthetic rehabilitation promotion reflecting white-collar instead of working-class male values of the prewar era constitute the "other arms race."	2
"Reconstructing the Hiroshima Maidens" retells the story of twenty-five women deformed by the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima who came to the United States in 1955 for reconstructive surgery—a "medicalized version of the Marshall Plan" meant to repair trauma as well as erase cultural memory. Physicians would later export the surgical techniques used therapeutically on the Maidens. Adaptation of these techniques to help Asians look more "Anglo" suggests how the Maidens were unwitting participants in a medicalized Cold War legacy of cultural imperialism.	. . .

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