| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Sheila M. Rothman and David J. Rothman. The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical Enhancement. New York: Pantheon. 2003. Pp. xxi, 292. $25.00.
Sheila M. Rothman and David J. Rothman have written a fascinating book about the pharmacological and surgical means used by physicians, drug companies, and patients to optimize human form and character during the twentieth century. Their focus on the interplay among these three constituencies—held together by attention to the economic and aesthetic imperatives that drove developments—makes a compelling addition to traditional medical history. More to the point, this is the story of doctors and drug companies working together to exploit ideas of "perfection" in order to promote their services and goods to under-informed and over-eager patients, seemingly, at the cost of the patients safety. Rothman and Rothman also implicitly document a twentieth-century Western culture obsessed with youthfulness; indeed, it is the desire to achieve the "perfection" of an idealized young adulthood that links their examination of the sometimes disparate treatments detailed below.	1
Chapter one rehearses controversial biological developments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led to the "knowledge that glands produced and circulated vital substances through the bloodstream" and the foundation of modern endocrinology (p. 12). Particularly resourceful in this chapter is the use of school books and literary texts to show how "freaks" became "patients with glandular irregularities" in the popular mind, thus muddying the line between "cure" and "enhancement" (p. 18).	. . .

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