Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War
"[A] richly innovative study. . . . Geroulanos and Meyers present an imaginative case for the First World War's transformative effect on popular and scientific understandings of the human body. Their careful exposition of the spiralling development of the concept of physiological integration in the fields of anthropology, cybernetics and philosophy makes a highly original contribution to 20th-century intellectual history and will provide a fertile springboard for future research."-- "Times Higher Education" "A tour de force of intellectual history. . . . a book of immense erudition and careful exegesis of both scientific and philosophical disputes. It adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of the effect of the 1914-18 conflict on a number of fields of scientific research and medical practice, including physiology and psychoanalysis. . . . [Geroulanos and Meyers] are to be congratulated for capturing the excitement of the clash of scientific ideas in this period, and for doing so in a way that gives us a glimpse of the foibles of many of the central figures. We not only hear these individuals; we can almost feel them in action. . . . This book is one of the truly original contributions to historical writing to appear during the centenary of the outbreak of the war in 1914."-- "History and Theory" "An inspiring and innovative work that opens up alternative perspectives on how scholarship addresses the history of the conflict. With this study, we have a model for integrating disparate forms of data to conceive an investigation that explains the complex and divergent experiences of the First World War."-- "Journal of Modern History" "By illustrating the debts of the postmodern era to the medical sciences of the early century, Geroulanos and Meyers give us a very different picture of the demise of the liberal subject than the one we knew."-- "Public Books" "Geroulanous and Meyers have examined the growth of recognition that the body's ability to recover, regenerate, or revitalize depended on the integration of body, mind, and patient response. These discoveries also transformed the postwar language of regeneration for politics and recovery of war-torn nations. Recommended."-- "Choice" "If the ultimate object of history is to understand what it means--has meant--to be human, then Geroulanos and Meyers's book on the human body as understood by medicine, biological science, sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology, and psychoanalysis in the twentieth century is a tour de force."-- "Isis" "The value of this book is its deep engagement with new source materials that implicate many core phenomenologists and medical anthropologists. . . Geroulanos and Meyers have offered a vast compilation of historical actors across a range of fields who, together, offer a complex origin story of twentieth-century neuro-physiology, psychology, social theory, political theory, and therapeutics."-- "Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences" "Wonderful and groundbreaking. . . Geroulanos and Meyers have written a monumental book that seems acutely relevant to our time: when the climate crisis and antibiotic resistance once again demonstrate the fragility of our bodies and societies and point to how our bodies are deeply entangled with nature, we once again move towards the body that physiologists and physicians a century ago struggled so hard to understand and construct."-- "Somatosphere" "The originality of this volume consists not only in its object, namely the 'ontology of the body at war', but also in the method adopted, which makes use of an extremely detailed research based on the study of medical archives and scientific literature without losing sight of the overall epistemological argument. . . . Geroulanos and Meyers' thorough investigation on the medical
Stefanos Geroulanos is associate professor of history at New York University. Todd Meyers is associate professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Society, Health, and Medicine at New York University--Shanghai.