Cathy Hannabach, Blood Cultures: Medicine, Media, and Militarisms (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. viii, 153, $67.50, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-137-58158-7.

on this tradition to outline the way in which two sensory messages arriving simultaneously – for example through the eye and the ear – laid down associations that were then reexcited whenever just one of the elements reappeared. To use his favourite example, the sight and sound of a bleating lamb laid down association fibres connecting the visual image of a woolly quadruped with the auditory stimulus ‘baah’. Thereafter, just hearing the bleat would be sufficient to produce a visual image of a lamb in the mind. The bridge from Meynert to the rest of the protagonists is a wonderful chapter on Meynert’s student Carl Wernicke. Wernicke was able to plant his name on the human neural map on the basis of just two observed cases of aphasia, which he theorised in terms of a dynamic network linking the sensory reception of heard language with the motor production of spoken words. Guenther then examines what happened to this model of brain function when Wernicke tried to apply it in the clinic. He would ask a patient a question, sending the inquiry into his or her brain ‘like a psychic sonar that could determine the seat of a lesion along the “mental reflex arc”’ (50). Wernicke conducted these interrogations of patients in a lecture hall in front of an audience. The exchanges would be recorded in transcripts that then became the objects of analysis. The complexity of the patients’ responses to the questions turned out to confound any neat physiological schema. As a result, Wernicke rejected the patho-anatomical approach in favour of a deep engagement with the language of these highly theatrical clinical performances, anticipating many of the developments in psychiatry in the century to follow. In a series of dazzlingly concise case histories, Guenther then shows how variations on the Meynert–Wernicke model of the brain – sensory input, complex associations, motor output – informed the clinical practices of Carl Wernicke, Sigmund Freud, Otfrid Foerster, Paul Schilder and Wilder Penfield. Localization and its Discontents shows how these practitioners’ divergent approaches to nervous system disorders – from talk therapy to neurosurgery – actually emerged from a common set of problems about the nature of the reflex arc and the possibilities of reflex therapy. The chapter on Freud was informed by Guenther’s discovery in the Library of Congress of a previously unknown manuscript by the father of psychoanalysis (73). Showing clearly how psychoanalysis emerged from Freud’s engagement with the problems of reflex therapy, it provides the reader with a richer sense of the shared scientific terrain than any previous account. By analytically uniting this cast of characters, Guenther has sharpened our understanding of the individual practitioners and deepened our sense of the context in which they worked. Along the way, the tensions, contradictions and potentials of contemporary neuroscience are supplied with a most illuminating prehistory.