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.

LRB 31 August 1989 | PDF Download