War, Medicine & Modernity

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Edited by three scholars of the history of medicine, War, Medicine & Modernity offers a chronological and thematic survey of the place of medicine in modern warfare and society. From the role of the civilian Red Cross in the Franco-Prussian war to the disciplining of fear in the Second World War, and from the study of plague in Cape Town during the Anglo-Boer War to the use of chemical warfare in World War I, the diverse essays collected here introduce key topics in the study of war in the modern period. In their useful introduction, Cooter and Sturdy explore the very idea of the modern and put Max Weber's analysis of the bureaucratization of social life at the center of their account of the experience of war and medicine since 1870: we need to understand, the authors suggest, "the reciprocal processes of the civilianization of medicine in war and its militarization during peacetime." That double focus--the state regimentation of health, medicine as a bureaucratic and humanitarian exercise of control--is sustained through this collection, in part to put history and sociology back into recent discussions of war and modernity. At times the editors seem irritable with, even dismissive of, some of those discussions ; nevertheless, this is a collection that should start to broaden the scope of that ongoing discussion. --Vicky Lebeau, Amazon.co.uk