Nature transfigured: science and literature, 1700–1900

depressed marionette in the medical advertisement discussed by Dr Jordanova is brought back to life by a daily dose of Ludiomil. For the most part the analyses are compelling, even if at times the reader might want rather more evidence and slightly less speculation. The gendered nature of anatomizing crops up several times in the book, culminating in a section in the final chapter in which Dr Jordanova quotes surgeons describing the pleasure of their work in terms of sexual intercourse. Such sentiments, she argues, and to some extent shows, cannot be dismissed as whimsy. They have deep roots in western culture. There is, of course, the problem of reading too much into such indentifications. Sexual intercourse is regularly drawn on in our culture as a comparative standard of hedonistic excellence. The operatic singer Leontyne Price likened it to applause, and only slightly inferior. Dr Jordanova's challenging and, I think, convincing interpretation of the history of anatomy provokes further questions. If, in recent Western society, gendered assumptions have been a prerequisite of anatomizing, the argument might have been made more descriptively thick by a reconsideration of hostility to dissection. After all, dissection is an acceptable practice now but it was not always so, especially for certain groups in society. What, in other words, is the relation between the structuring assumptions and local custom and belief'? Did the eighteenthand early nineteenth-century opponents of dissection have to learn to see it as gendered in order to accept it, or was it already gendered for them (because of the universality of the category) but responses to it determined by local factors, say, kinship or religion? This is simply part of the broader question which is not addressed by the author, possibly because of the temporal constraints of the volume. It would have been intriguing to have had Dr Jordanova tell us how far she sees the history of eighteenthand nineteenthcentury culture in terms of the creation of new assumptions and how far was it simply the redeployment of very ancient ones. Like all good books this one pushes us on to ask the second order question by correctly framing those of the first.