Robert Weston,Medical consulting by letter in France, 1665-1789

This review investigates Robert Weston’'s Medical Consulting by Letter in France, 1665–1789. Weston uses correspondence between physicians and patients to explore perceptions of health and methods of treatments in early modern France. He also approaches the theme of how authority was expressed and perceived in epistolary communication. This book is important in its exploration of an underutilized source and its contribution to an understanding of how medical relationships were constructed in the past. With a rigorous structure and a high volume of information, Weston’'s work is an invaluable contribution to historical literature on early modern France.     

Strange Legacies of the Terror: Hegel,the French Revolution,and the Khmer Rouge Purges

Explanations of the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia often conflate two events: the far-ranging and self-destructive violence within the revolutionary Party, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of cadres, and the larger genocidal destruction of so-called “counter-revolutionary” classes and ethnic minorities. The exterminationist violence inflicted within the Khmer Rouge organization itself is perplexing, for its shape and sequence cannot be explained by theories of mass violence in the current literatures on genocide or state terror. Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we show how key features of a theory of limitless, exterminationist, and ultimately self-destructive violence are contained within G.W.F. Hegel’s obscure analysis of the Terror of the French Revolution. Second, this Hegelian theory of exterminationist violence with a particular model of modern consciousness at its heart, can account for the transformation of typical forms of revolutionary violence into limitless self-annihilation. By drawing on Party documents, speeches, and radio broadcasts, we show that this theory can explain the shape and sequence of the internal purges of the Khmer Rouge.