Bubonic Plague in early modern Russia: public health and urban disaster

clear whether the manuscript survives. Nevertheless, beginning in 1870, references to Alexina regularly appear in European legal and medical literature, as well as in Armand Dubarry's medical fantasy-novel L'hermaphrodite (1899) and, even more explicitly, in a novel entitled A scandal at the convent (1893) by the German playwright Oscar Panizzi. After 1900 Alexina, now dead for a quarter of a century, continued to claim the attention of writers such as F. L. von Neugebauer who discusses her in his inventory of hermaphrodites in history (1908). Alexina's diary is not a work of literary art but deserves to stand beside second-rank novels of the late nineteenth century. It is impossible to improve on the jacket description which summarizes the diary as follows: "With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her own day, Barbin tells the story of her life as an hermaphrodite." Alexina herself has captured the diary's significance this way: "I have to speak of things that, for a number of people, will be nothing but incredible nonsense because, in fact, they go beyond the limits of what is possible" (p. xv). The diary, now admirably translated into English for the first time, may be compared with English accounts of the same period in order to learn what were the pathetic confessions of those "other Victorians" who, like Alexina, were sexual underdogs of their day. If such diaries continue to be published, psychiatrists as well as medical and literary historians will eventually possess a new archive from which to formulate hypotheses about sexual otherness in history. From another vantage, Alexina and her diary are less significant than the author of this book: by now Michel Foucault has established himself as a thinker of international, if controversial, significance. The very fact that he should choose to introduce and discuss this diary in particular is far more crucial than any intrinsic merit or medical-historical value the diary possesses. Foucault's multi-volume History ofsexuality notwithstanding, even his last book introduced the case history of extraordinary sexual otherness: Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother . . . (1975). The pattern Foucault adopts is clear: Pierre, Alexina, these types are the protagonists of the forthcoming volumes in the history of sexuality, and this is why Foucault notes in the present book (p. 119) that "the question of strange destinies like her [Barbin's] own, which have raised so many problems for medicine and law, especially since the sixteenth century, will be dealt with in the volume of The history ofsexuality that will be devoted to hermaphrodites." Foucault has charted his own road through the country of sex; it covers not only the untrodden land between medicine and the law but also retrieves the still lonely voices of those with intense religiosity and remarkable sexual histories from the past. G. S. Rousseau Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles