THE BODY AT WAR

This book is one of the truly original contributions in historical writing to appear during the centenary of the outbreak of the war in 1914. The authors' central argument is that at the time of the Great War, scientists and physicians reconfigured the human body as both a living organism and a site of meaning. They developed the notion that the body was an integrated set of self-regulating systems, the precariousness of which threatened all of us with death every single day. The authors term this the “integration–crisis duet.” Although the origins of this formulation long antedated the war, the problem of treating thousands of men who suffered from various forms of shock—wound shock, surgical shock, shell shock—brought this new configuration of the human body into high relief during and in the decades after the war. The metaphor of homeostasis, or self-regulation, Geroulanos and Meyers claim, was so powerful that it spread well beyond the domain of physiology and medicine to facets of psychoanalysis, political thought, cybernetics, philosophy, and anthropology.