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.

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Vol. 11 No. 16 · 31 August 1989 » Roy Porter » Body History (print version)
pages 11-12 | 2630 words

Letters

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