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How the Cows Turned Mad (review)

the professional practice of connecting the present and past actions and events” (p. 2). Remembering, then, is not simply a process of memory, but also membering, configuring, again. This theoretical approach makes the historian in general, often Palladino himself in particular, as much what the book is about as the plants and the patients. Authorial self-consciousness can be a useful antidote to the false impartiality of so-called objective history, but it can also set up a hall of mirrors that traps reader and writer alike in a loop of reflexivity. Historians in their archives, Palladino suggests, can perhaps be like genetic engineers with their genome maps, so readers should be as careful as we citizens should be of our food in an era of genetically modified foods. Analogies are seductive and, at their best, suggestive; their power is precisely in their imprecision. I find this analogy, though, very theory-driven and sketchy; I would prefer a closer examination of the practical similarities and, as importantly, differences between archives and genome sequences. Discussion of these particular facts, if they supported the analogy, would in turn be a contribution to the development of theory. At its most effective—in the conclusion to chapter 3, for example—theory serves as a seasoning that heightens the discussion of agricultural genetics without swamping it, providing enough historical detail to illustrate the theoretical points in action. In his acknowledgments (pp. vii–viii), the author refers his readers to several of his articles dating back to 1990 for more detail, suggesting that the current work is a synthesis of those essays. The synthesis is not entirely seamless, for there are problems with repetition and continuity as if the original papers were only lightly edited to form individual chapters. Still, as that body of work suggests, Paolo Palladino has thought at some depth about plants and patients in the age of genetics and has earned the right to reflect on what that means for the practice of history.