| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia. By Simon P. Newman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. xii, 211 pp. Cloth, $47.50, ISBN 0-8122-3731-5. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8122-1848-5.)

Embodied History offers an examination of the poor in Philadelphia during the early national years through a physiological lens, using the corporeal bodies of the social class as a means for historical analysis. Simon P. Newman argues that this type of assessment will explain the living and working conditions of the "lower sort" and their efforts at resisting social control. The poor are followed through the almshouse, the jail, and Pennsylvania Hospital as representing institutions that attempt to care for the poor and to control the swelling population that was underemployed or unemployed. Using case examples, Newman makes the poor come alive as he tracks them through the city's institutions. Efforts by the elites to define the deserving poor and to allow this group the use of Pennsylvania Hospital demonstrate the practices of social engineering. Elites wanted an ordered society with the poor exhibiting the proper deference to their betters. This proposition, as Newman explains, became increasingly difficult as the population of Philadelphia expanded. People from the countryside, immigrants, and runaway indentured servants and slaves brought increased problems of poverty and sickness to the neighborhoods of Philadelphia. As always, the fundamental problems for the poor were low-paying jobs, seasonal work, job-related injuries, and a surplus of labor.

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