| 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

Andrew Burstein. Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello. New York: Basic Books. 2005. Pp. xiii, 351. $25.00.
Among the political icons of the revolutionary generation, perhaps none is as closely associated with the life of the mind as Thomas Jefferson. A voracious reader and a polymath with practically innumerable interests, Jefferson is often considered an epitome of the Enlightenment and a man to whom nothing mattered quite so much as knowledge and the power of reason. Yet Jefferson was hardly an ethereal being whose intellectual pursuits freed him from fleshly concerns, a reality perhaps never more obvious than in recent years, when discussions about the third president's sex life have been more widespread in popular discourse than about his understanding of, say, the rights of man.	1
Andrew Burstein extends and deepens this contemporary focus on Jefferson's physicality, making the case that the cerebral Jefferson can be understood only in context of the corporeal Jefferson. Drawing much of his evidence from the underused but voluminous correspondence and writings of Jefferson's retirement years at Monticello after his presidency ended in 1809, Burstein especially argues that Jefferson's engagement with the medical literature and biological knowledge of his era offers a window into his larger worldview as he considered the final stage of his long life. Such an analysis provides entry to a lost vocabulary of spasms, irritants, agitations, and convulsions which Jefferson often deployed for both literal and metaphorical purposes, and to a mindset in which life itself was about finding balance and harmony—what Jefferson referred to as a quest for "tranquil permanent felicity"—amid the nervous excitability endemic to human existence.	. . .

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