Sexology in culture: labelling bodies and desires

come to understand phenomena. By stripping all this away, Harris fails in the enterprise of understanding the past: describing what researchers thought they saw and explaining why they thought they were right. What were they really doing when they were thinking about cells and their place in the animated body? His stripping away of the interpretative matrix also devalues the contributions microscopists sought to make to wider cultural and metaphysical debates. Harris's approach is not mandatory for those defending scientific realism, and he is naive in supposing he has rediscovered his subject. This book is fundamentally a scientist's effort to establish priority in discovering the modern view of nature. Historians also will criticize Harris on scholarship. For all his attention to priority and communication, Harris provides almost no access to the large historical literature on his subject. Is there nothing of value in the recent history of science for the historian of microscopic anatomy? Though not his primary focus, the history of technique and instruments are treated lightly except when invoked to explain limitations and errant interpretations. Integrating this growing body of literature also would have served Harris well, especially as it is clear he is well qualified to provide such integration. Despite its fundamental flaws, Harris's book offers a useful survey of sources and people for microscopic anatomy and cell thinking. The narrative offers a substantial improvement on elementary accounts found in the biologists' textbooks and gives the next generation a firm foundation to build upon. That Harris leaves much to do should be seen more as a challenge to the historian than as a criticism. That he could speak to the intellectual context but chooses not to remains this work's greatest disappointment.