Roy Porter, who died in March 2002, was a regular, much admired and much envied contributor to the LRB: he was the author of an astonishing number of books, including London: A Social History (1994), The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (1997) and Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000).
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
6 September 2001
On menstruation
3 January 2002
On ageing
25 January 2001
On self-portraiture
19 October 2000
On the human body
4 March 1999
Greek Gynaecology
8 December 1994
Magic Zones
19 April 1990
Hungry Ghosts
RELATED CATEGORIES
Sex, Gender, Science, technology and mathematics, Biology, Human body, History, History of ideas, Science, technology and mathematics, Medicine
Vol. 11 No. 16 · 31 August 1989
pages 11-12 | 2630 words
Body History
Roy Porter
- The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture by Dorinda Outram
Yale, 197 pp, £22.00, May 1989, ISBN 0 300 04436 4
- Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories by Barbara Gates
Princeton, 190 pp, £19.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 691 09437 3
- Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the 18th and 20th Centuries by Ludmilla Jordanova
Harvester, 224 pp, £19.95, April 1989, ISBN 0 07 450033 3
- Family, Love and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen by Jeanne Peterson
Indiana, 241 pp, $39.95, May 1989, ISBN 0 253 20509 3
Suddenly, everyone seems to be writing about the body, and eyebrows are being raised. ‘What sort of history is the history of the body?’ asks Peter Biller in a recent review, voicing scepticism about the genre itself: even ‘a moderate example of body history’, he concludes, ‘can principally incarnate a certain blindness towards the past.’ Do academics feel similarly hesitant about studying more cerebral things – ideas, for example? Cold-water treatment of this kind merely proves the point historians of the body are making. We have lived too long within our Platonic, Pauline and Cartesian prejudices; we value the mind (no complaint about that), but deny the flesh, so that we no longer even entertain its history.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 11 No. 20 · 26 October 1989
From Peter Biller
Roy Porter writes eloquently in defence of ‘Body History’ (LRB, 31 August): ‘we value the mind (no complaint about that), but deny the flesh, so that we no longer even entertain its history.’ In so doing, he uses two quotations from me in order to represent attacks on Body History – ‘scepticism about the genre itself’. Well, it’s useful to have an Aunt Sally to knock down, but this particular Aunt Sally does not quite fit the bill, because I was not saying precisely what Roy Porter suggests I was saying. The background was this. I was writing a review for History Today of a very poor example of Body History, and another review for the Times Higher Education Supplement of another example which was no more than moderately good. Reading these two books prompted me to refer to both books in my second review, and to some reflections from which Roy Porter quotes. The burden of my remarks was as follows. The variety of sources and disciplines a body-historian must master means that doing this sort of history well is much more difficult than doing more conventional sorts of history. There is a danger that rapid magpie-research will ally with clichés about past societies to produce books which (I quote the passage Roy Porter quoted) ‘can principally incarnate a certain blindness to the past’. The vogue for this sort of history adds to the danger – shown here by the readiness to publish translations of two books of doubtful quality.
If I had been launching an attack on good Body History – let’s say, Peter Brown – Roy Porter might have had good reason to use my review: but I wasn’t. I have myself published on the borders of the genre, on Medieval birth-control, childbirth and heretics’ medicine, and am aware of some of the difficulties. My position is: ‘this is very difficult, it needs to be done well; all around are the pitfalls of not mastering various disciplines, ignoring evidence, and the lure of trendiness.’
Peter Biller
University of York
