“They're in the Trade... of Lunacy/They `cannot interfere'—they say”: the Scottish Lunacy Commissioners and lunacy reform in nineteenth-century Scotland

time. Modern film and contemporary cinema are doubtlessly permeated with Freud's discontented daughters; Bronfen would have strengthened her case by explaining why Hitchcock and Cronenberg are more performatively hysterical than his. Even so, "performing hysteria" has not often been the subject of interpretation so astute as found here, this despite medicine's awareness that the hysteric "performs her illness" as a diva sings her opera. Hysteria's subjectivity, history, and abundant case histories have engaged many students; far fewer its performance and broadcasts, strong and weak. Bronfen's sense of hysteria's cultural profile follows close on. Except among feminists, hysteria's histories (surely in the plural) have usually been monodisciplinary piecemeal presentations rather than broad transdisciplinary canvases on which the hysteric's condition is laid out. Hysteria's Gothic implications (i.e., Gothic fiction, Gothic sensibility, Gothic film, the world of Frankenstein and Dracula) have long been known and interpreted, "especially the Gothic text as a paradigmatic example of the family's romance" (p. 153). Yet her interpretations are always fresh. The material Bronfen presents on Karl Jaspers is new and worthy of even more treatment than she provides here, in part because nostalgia has been so ineptly configured in relation to health and disease. But the insistence that hysteria's performing history its "broadcasts"-belongs in these discussions is by far the most original part. It would be wrongheaded to construe The knotted subject as irrelevant to the history of medicine. Just the opposite is true: it represents a triumph for this subject. Here, in effect, is a well-informed authoritative cultural critic claiming that she cannot do without the history of psychiatry. The history of medicine is insufficient as a totalizing account in itself, but hysteria's profiles, Bronfen suggests, must begin in medical speculation. Despite Freud, little changes in our century regarding the paradoxes of hysteria. Yet just a generation ago cultural critics flaunted their indifference to medicine; now they start ab ovo with it. Perhaps Foucault predicted all this in his archaeologies of madness and histories of the clinic. No grand theory lurks here about hysteria's transformations throughout history, yet everywhere The knotted subject brims with critical insight couched in attractive prose. Although pushing 500 pages this is no dull Burtonian repository composed in the cast of Germanic thoroughness. Students of hysteria's eternal mysteries who read it will be persuaded that its cultural profile has been enlarged. Someone who can do this in the aftermath of the twentieth-century …