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A History of Euphoria: The Perception and Misperception of Health and Well-Being by Christopher Milnes (review)

If a history has, at the core of its argument, an unchanging human universal that transcends all periods and places, is it still a history? This is the central challenge in Christopher Milnes’s book about the perception of health. It fastens on to feelings with respect to illness and recovery that are, Milnes claims, biologically and psychologically fundamental about humans. This claim is asserted at the outset and reasserted throughout, furnished with (to use Milnes’s own description of one the sources he employs) “a fairly long list” of block quotations, from Plato to the present, that are given the task of demonstrating that the assertion is true, at least in “the west” (p. 73). There is, in this scattergun approach to collating diverse sources, decontextualizing them, and presenting them as proofs, an acute sense of tension that is never resolved. The first two thirds of the book focus on perception and misperception of health, and the ways that people perceive and misperceive the health and illness of others. Milnes puts forward countless examples of historical peculiarity, of ways of thinking and feeling and sensing that are situated and specific, that demand attention precisely because of the historicity they suggest for the ways in which humans have perceived or misperceived their health. Specific forms of knowledge—about the body, the soul, the brain, the heart, or the world—have framed and delimited the practices of falling ill and recovery, as well as the ways of diagnosing and treating. But historical perception here is smoothed through modern translations that thwart scrutiny. Biocultural contingencies and conceptualizations that go to the heart of experience, to the shape and particular color of perception, scream even from this highly selective procession of quotations. Yet this is all buffed away as a kind of cultural contextual gloss that obscures the universals underneath. Where undeniable historical change is documented, such as the disappearance of “frenzies” of communal dancing (p. 108) or the demise of “delirium” (p. 119), there