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Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire by Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor (review)

rage. According to the essays in this volume, historians of medicine do not appear to be doing much right at all. The “framing” of disease is a weak reconstitution of the social; historians have become wannabe bioethicists, themselves enthralled with the power of biomedicine; historians of globalization have, through their efforts, merely reified global capitalism and have failed to interrogate its inherent imbalances of power. One could argue that the history of medicine needs a jumpstart, but some of these critiques appear to miss the mark. On global histories of health and disease, for example, one wonders how and in what ways Cooter and Stein find Randall Packard, Julie Livingston, Nancy Rose Hunt, or David Arnold to be ignoring the operations of power and the persistence of colonial memory, to be reinforcing a neoliberal agenda through their explorations of the political economies and cultural dimensions of sickness and health in the postcolonial state. All in all, this volume offers a valuable commentary on what Cooter and Stein call “the devaluation of the humanities in favor of the sciences,” a contemporary agenda that has many historians on edge. But the book’s essays are undergirded by a scathing critique of those means of humanistic investigation of medicine the authors deem insufficient in their critical power, and indeed, ultimately supportive of the subsuming of history to biomedicine. Such a portrayal of humanists stampeding each other to draw on the fantasy of future prosperity in the trough of scientism ignores the actual work of many historians of medicine. And as a call to arms, it is likelier to alienate their colleagues than to spark them into action.