Walt Whitman and Sir William Osler: a poet and his physician

follows with a wonderful piece on the cataloguing of the monstrous from the cabinet to the collections and representations of embryological monsters. Roy Porter, too, fills in the details for the eighteenth century. His brilliant essay on "monsters and the mad" fills in the conceptual gap which Zapperi leaves between these two categories. He shows how both categories reinforce each other on the margins of the conceptual world of the Enlightenment. Hans Richard Brittnacher's essay on Lavater and the visualization of the monstrous would have benefited from a knowledge of the more recent studies of Lavater's hermeneutics by Richard Gray and Lilliane Weisberg. It is absolutely right to place the monstrous in the world of the physiognomist, but the central role of medical physiognomy for Lavater cannot be easily judged by the major threevolume work which most scholars, including Brittnacher, use, but by the thin little outline Lavater produced prior to this work. There the pathological is revealed as the central shaping force for his physiognomic theories. The nineteenth century is represented by three amazing essays-Peter Becker on Lombroso and criminal types as monsters, Rudolph Stichweh on the body of the Other, and Andreas Hartmann on Magnus Hirschfeld (et al.) writing and imagining about hermaphrodism at the turn of the century. All three of these essays could and do have the problem of anti-Semitism as their shaping force for an understanding of the monstrous body in Europe. Lombroso's criminals are marginal types (as I showed with the earliest representations of the criminal insane in my Seeing the insane) and Lombroso's role as an Italian Jew is especially evident at the end of his long career. One marginal body displaces another marginal body. The body of the Other reflects Stichweh's understanding of the construction of the Jewish body quite directly. And the prize "body" in Hartmann's essay is "N.O. Body", the German-Jewish transvestite. A comprehensive bibliography closes the volume, which presents a solid handbook for the historical specificity of the monstrous body. Hagner has added admirably to the literature on the monstrous with this book, which will claim a central space in any bibliography on the world of the monstrous, which is, of course, the world of ourselves.