Shattered nerves: doctors, patients, and depression in Victorian England. Essay review.

had forceps before the 1 730s at the earliest; and perforators were, to the best ofmy knowledge, a nineteenth-century invention. I have not the ghost of an idea what a head-puller is meant to be. In the illustration opposite p. 141, which shows a surgeon and a dismembered foetus, the instrument is almost certainly a sharp hook. It is not, as suggested, a pair of forceps with which it would have been impossible to produce dismemberment of the kind illustrated. The footnotes are maddening. There is no running head to guide one by the page number, and works are cited without dates as in "La Motte, Traite pp. 406-7" or the example of "Peu, Pratique" given above. The reader may search back through the footnotes for the full reference, but usually in vain. There is no bibliography; only a list of secondary sources in 'Further reading'. In spite of a memorable collection of stories, this is a disappointing work. On the dust cover it is suggested "This book will surely become the standard scholarly text on the history of childbirth in pre-modern times". Not for long, I hope.