The Canadian Journal of Health History is actively looking for reviewers to assess new titles in the field of health and medical history. We welcome book reviews of 800 to 1,000 words written by graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars.
Please contact the appropriate editor below if you are interested in having your or your press’ book reviewed in the journal.
English Book Review Editor
Eric Story
Adjunct Professor
Department of History
Wilfrid Laurier University
estory@wlu.ca
French Book Review Editor
Martin Robert
Maître de conférences
Faculté de Lettres
Institut catholique de Paris
m.robert@icp.fr
Our English language book titles are below. Please contact Eric Story (estory@wlu.ca) if you are interested in reviewing one or more of the books listed here.
Canada
The Labour of Care: Canada’s Health Care Workers, 1945–2020 (Toronto, 2026)
Peter Twohig
Wired Together: The Montreal Neurological Institute and the Origins of Neuroscience (Chicago, 2026)
Yvan Prkachin [UNDER REVIEW]
A Healer and a Builder: The Life and Times of Dr. John R. Augustine (Friesen, 2025)
Philip W. Augustine
Indigenous Healing as Paradox: Re-Membering and Biopolitics in the Settler Colony (Alberta, 2025)
Krista Maxwell
When Disease Came To This Country: Epidemics and Colonialism in Northern North America (Cambridge, 2023)
Liza Piper [UNDER REVIEW]
Alcohol, Drugs & Addiction
Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers (Oxford, 2026)
Benjamin Robert Sigel
Coca and the Victorians: From Botanical Curiosity to Regulated Drug, 1835–1912 (Columbia, 2026)
Kim Embrey
Intoxicated Ways of Knowing: The Untold Story of Intoxicants and the Biological Subject in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Chicago, 2026)
Matthew Perkins-McVey
On Trial: Testing New Drugs in Psychiatry, 1940–1980 (Manchester, 2026)
Marietta Meier, Mario König and Magaly Tornay
Exoticizing Consumption: European Drug Cultures, 1670-1740 (Pittsburgh, 2025)
Edited By E. C. Spary, Justin Rivest
Temperance Lives: Life Assurance, Drink, and Medicine in Britain, 1840-1918 (Bloomsbury, 2025)
James Kneale
Art, Medicine, and Femininity: Visualising the Morphine Addict in Paris, 1870-1914 (McGill-Queens, 2024)
Hannah Halliwell [UNDER REVIEW]
Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe (Cornell, 2024)
Scott K. Taylor
Addiction Becomes Normal: On the Late-Modern American Subject (Chicago, 2024)
Jaeyoon Park
The Long War on Drugs (Duke, 2024)
Anne L. Foster
On Addiction: Insights from History, Ethnography, and Critical Theory (Duke, 2024)
Darin Weinberg
Disability & Chronic Illness
Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America (Princeton, 2026)
Beth Linker
Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long COVID (California, 2026)
Emily Mendenhall
An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights (California, 2025)
Scot Danforth
Secrecy and Safety: A Cultural History of Seizures in Modern America (Johns Hopkins, 2025)
Rachel Elder [UNDER REVIEW]
Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (California, 2025)
Sunaura Taylor [UNDER REVIEW]
The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2025)
Dagmar Herzog
Unmentionable Madness: Gender, Disability, and Shame in the Malaria Treatment of Neurosyphilis (Illinois, 2025)
Christin L. Hancock [UNDER REVIEW]
Wounded for Life: Seven Union Veterans of the Civil War (Indiana, 2024)
Robert D. Hicks
A Male Hysteria: Diabetes and the Victorian Mind (Penn State, 2024)
Edward Beasley
Embodied Histories
The Fox, the Shrew, and You: How Brains Evolved (Princeton, 2026)
Rogier Mars
Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford, 2025)
Meegan Kennedy
Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting: A Social History of the Modern Voice (Penn State, 2025)
Josephine Hoegaerts
Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image (Princeton, 2025)
Jack Hartnell
Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic (Chicago, 2025)
Alison Bashford
Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine (Johns Hopkins, 2025)
Lan A. Li
The New Physiognomy: Face, Form, and Modern Expression (Johns Hopkins, 2024)
Rochelle Rives
Environment
The Sleepless Ape: The Story of Sleep in Human Evolution (Princeton, 2026)
David R. Samson
Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (California, 2025)
Sunaura Taylor [UNDER REVIEW]
Europe’s Laboratory: Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Northern Illinois, 2025)
Matthew P. Romaniello
Epidemics/Pandemics
Disasters of Biblical Proportions: The Ten Plagues Then, Now, and at the End of the World (Princeton, 2026)
Steven Weitzman
How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Christos Lynteris
The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Andrew M. Wehrman
Doctrine and Disease in the British and Spanish Colonial World (Pennsylvania, 2025)
Edited by Kathleen Miller
The War Against Tuberculosis: Samuel G. Dixon and the Rise of Modern Public Health in Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania, 2025)
James E. Higgins
The Lung Block: Plagues, Parks, and Power in Progressive-Era New York (Pittsburgh, 2025)
Adrienne deNoyelles
Ecologies of Disease Control: Spaces of Health Security in Historical Perspective (Pittsburgh, 2025)
Edited By Carolin Mezes, Sven Opitz and Andrea Wiegeshoff
The Last Great Plague of Colonial India (Oxford, 2025)
Natasha Sarkar
Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (California, 2025)
Neville Wallace Hoad
A Town without Pity: AIDS, Race, and Resistance in Florida’s Deep South (Florida, 2025)
Jason Vuic
Reconfiguring Global Societies in the Pre-Vaccination Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic (Toronto, 2024)
Edited by Jack Fong
When Disease Came To This Country: Epidemics and Colonialism in Northern North America (Cambridge, 2023)
Liza Piper [UNDER REVIEW]
Form Follows Fever: Malaria and the Construction of Hong Kong, 1841–1849 (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2024)
Christopher Cowell
Reflections on the Pandemic: COVID and Social Crises in the Year Everything Changed (Rutgers, 2024)
Edited by Teresa Politano
Europe
The Politics of the Table: Nutrition and the Body in Modern Germany (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Kristen Ann Ehrenberger
Spectacles and the Victorians: Measuring, Defining and Shaping Visual Capacity (Manchester, 2026)
Gemma Almond-Brown
The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 2026)
Olivia Weisser
Generating Difference: Race and Reproduction in the British Empire, 1660–1840 (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Andrew Wells
Coca and the Victorians: From Botanical Curiosity to Regulated Drug, 1835–1912 (Columbia, 2026)
Kim Embrey
Intoxicated Ways of Knowing: The Untold Story of Intoxicants and the Biological Subject in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Chicago, 2026)
Matthew Perkins-McVey
On Trial: Testing New Drugs in Psychiatry, 1940–1980 (Manchester, 2026)
Marietta Meier, Mario König and Magaly Tornay
Making Babies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2025)
Leah Astbury
Exoticizing Consumption: European Drug Cultures, 1670-1740 (Pittsburgh, 2025)
Edited By E. C. Spary and Justin Rivest
The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2025)
Dagmar Herzog
Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford, 2025)
Meegan Kennedy
The Lost Origins of Osteopathy and Chiropractic in European Mechanical Medicine (Routledge, 2025)
Anders Ottosson
The Doctor-Patient Relationship and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (Oxford, 2025)
Sarah Jones
The Culture of Care in Britain since the Second World War (Bristol, 2025)
Bernice Martin
Temperance Lives: Life Assurance, Drink, and Medicine in Britain, 1840-1918 (Bloomsbury, 2025)
James Kneale
Art, Medicine, and Femininity: Visualising the Morphine Addict in Paris, 1870-1914 (McGill-Queens, 2024)
Hannah Halliwell [UNDER REVIEW]
Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe (Cornell, 2024)
Scott K. Taylor
The Oxford Handbook of Galen (Oxford, 2024)
P.N. Singer and Ralph M. Rosen
Jewish Refugees and the British Nursing Profession: A Gendered Opportunity (Manchester, 2024)
Jane Brooks
Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2024)
Sam Fullerton
Motherhood Confined: Maternal Health in English Prisons, 1853–1955 (Manchester, 2024)
Rachel E. Bennett
Magic, Religion & Technology
Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation (Princeton, 2026)
Timothy J. Jorgenson
Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America (Princeton, 2026)
Kira Ganga Kieffer
Spectacles and the Victorians: Measuring, Defining and Shaping Visual Capacity (Manchester, 2026)
Gemma Almond-Brown
Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford, 2025)
Meegan Kennedy
Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic (Chicago, 2025)
Alison Bashford
Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia: Methodological Insights and Innovations (Manchester, 2025)
Edited by Michael Stanley-Baker
Technology, Health, and the Patient Consumer in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2025)
Edited by Rachel Elder and Thomas Schlich [UNDER REVIEW]
Transformed States: Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture, 1990-2020 (Rutgers, 2024)
Martin Halliwell
The Promise and Peril of CRISPR (Johns Hopkins, 2024)
Edited by Neal Baer
Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects (Johns Hopkins, 2024)
Kirsten Moore-Sheeley
Mental Health & Illness
Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long COVID (California, 2026)
Emily Mendenhall
On Trial: Testing New Drugs in Psychiatry, 1940–1980 (Manchester, 2026)
Marietta Meier, Mario König and Magaly Tornay
Wired Together: The Montreal Neurological Institute and the Origins of Neuroscience (Chicago, 2026)
Yvan Prkachin [UNDER REVIEW]
Colored Insane: Slavery, Asylums, and Mental Illness in the Nineteenth Century (Columbia, 2026)
Diana Martha Louis
Great Minds in Despair: The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933–1989 (McGill-Queen’s, 2025)
Frank Stahnisch
All Sky, Mirror Ocean: A Healing Manifesto (Alberta, 2024)
Brad Necyk
Practitioners & Workers
The Labour of Care: Canada’s Health Care Workers, 1945–2020 (Toronto, 2026)
Peter Twohig
Wired Together: The Montreal Neurological Institute and the Origins of Neuroscience (Chicago, 2026)
Yvan Prkachin [UNDER REVIEW]
Medical Education and the Making of Iraqi Doctors, 1869-1959 (Edinburgh, 2025)
Sara Farhan
To the Artizans of England (1852) by Florence Nightingale (Bookmundo, 2025)
Edited by Rob van der Peet
The Lost Origins of Osteopathy and Chiropractic in European Mechanical Medicine (Routledge, 2025)
Anders Ottosson
The Doctor-Patient Relationship and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (Oxford, 2025)
Sarah Jones [UNDER REVIEW]
The Culture of Care in Britain since the Second World War (Bristol, 2025)
Bernice Martin
The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America (Pittsburgh, 2025)
Edited By Diego Armus, Pablo F. Gómez
A Healer and a Builder: The Life and Times of Dr. John R. Augustine (Friesen, 2025)
Philip W. Augustine
Great Minds in Despair: The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933–1989 (McGill-Queen’s, 2025)
Frank Stahnisch
The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare (Johns Hopkins, 2025)
Eram Alam
The Oxford Handbook of Galen (Oxford, 2024)
P.N. Singer and Ralph M. Rosen
Jewish Refugees and the British Nursing Profession: A Gendered Opportunity (Manchester, 2024)
Jane Brooks
The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin’s Labour Camps (Yale, 2024)
Dan Healey [UNDER REVIEW]
Public Health
The War Against Tuberculosis: Samuel G. Dixon and the Rise of Modern Public Health in Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania, 2025)
James E. Higgins
Sanitizing Moscow: Waste, Animals, and Urban Health in Late Imperial Russia (Pittsburgh, 2025)
Anna Mazanik
Catastrophic Incentives: Why Our Approaches to Disasters Keep Falling Short (Columbia, 2024)
Jeff Schlegelmilch and Ellen Carlin
The Struggle for Public Health: Seven People Who Saved the Lives of Millions and Transformed the Way We Live (Johns Hopkins, 2024)
Fred C. Pampel [UNDER REVIEW]
The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning (Johns Hopkins, 2023)
Peter J. Hotez [UNDER REVIEW]
Queer Health
Standardized Sex: A History of Trans Medicine (Chicago, 2025)
Ketil Slagstad
A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States: From Margins to Mainstream (SUNY, 2025)
Edited by Carolyn Wolf-Gould, Dallas Denny, Jamison Green and Kyan Lynch
Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution (North Carolina, 2023)
Alison Li [UNDER REVIEW]
Race, Empire & Colonialism
How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Christos Lynteris
Generating Difference: Race and Reproduction in the British Empire, 1660–1840 (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Andrew Wells
The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (Pittsburgh, 2026)
Matthew James Crawford
Indigenous Healing as Paradox: Re-Membering and Biopolitics in the Settler Colony (Alberta, 2025)
Krista Maxwell
Doctrine and Disease in the British and Spanish Colonial World (Penn State, 2025)
Edited by Kathleen Miller
A Town without Pity: AIDS, Race, and Resistance in Florida’s Deep South (Florida, 2025)
Jason Vuic
Appalachian Epidemics: From Smallpox to COVID-19 (Kentucky, 2025)
Edited by Christopher M. White and Kevin T. Barksdale
Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science (Columbia, 2024)
Edited by Eram Alam, Dorothy Roberts, and Natalie Shibley
When Disease Came To This Country: Epidemics and Colonialism in Northern North America (Cambridge, 2023)
Liza Piper [UNDER REVIEW]
Sexual Health, Reproduction & Pediatrics
Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics (Stanford, 2026)
T.D. Harper-Shipman
Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton, 2026)
Anna Bonnell Freidin
The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 2026)
Olivia Weisser
Generating Difference: Race and Reproduction in the British Empire, 1660–1840 (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Andrew Wells
Making Babies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2025)
Leah Astbury
When Roe Fell: How Barriers, Inequities, and Systemic Failures of Justice in Abortion Became Visible (Bucknell, 2025)
Edited by Katrina Kimport
Body Language: Medicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel (Bucknell, 2025)
Kathleen Tamayo Alves
The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice (Rutgers, 2025)
Edited by The Nursing Clio Editorial Collective
Birth Politics: Colonial Power, Medical Pluralism, and Maternity in Nigeria (Johns Hopkins, 2025)
Ogechukwu Ezekwem Williams
Period: The Real Story of Menstruation (Princeton, 2024)
Kate Clancy
Viruses and Reproductive Injustice: Zika in Brazil (Johns Hopkins, 2024)
Ilana Löwy
Motherhood Confined: Maternal Health in English Prisons, 1853–1955 (Manchester, 2024)
Rachel E. Bennett
Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2024)
Sam Fullerton
Policing Pregnant Bodies: From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America (Johns Hopkins, 2023)
Kathleen M. Crowther [UNDER REVIEW]
United States
Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America (Princeton, 2026)
Kira Ganga Kieffer
The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Andrew M. Wehrman
Colored Insane: Slavery, Asylums, and Mental Illness in the Nineteenth Century (Columbia, 2026)
Diana Martha Louis
Health as Property: Racial Capitalism and Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles (California, 2026)
Nic John Ramos
An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights (California, 2025)
Scot Danforth
The War Against Tuberculosis: Samuel G. Dixon and the Rise of Modern Public Health in Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania, 2025)
James E. Higgins
The Lung Block: Plagues, Parks, and Power in Progressive-Era New York (Pittsburgh, 2025)
Adrienne deNoyelles
Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States (North Carolina, 2025)
Jess Libow
The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare (Johns Hopkins, 2025)
Eram Alam
Wounded for Life: Seven Union Veterans of the Civil War (Indiana, 2024)
Robert D. Hicks
Building the Worlds That Kill Us: Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History (Columbia, 2024)
David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz
Addiction Becomes Normal: On the Late-Modern American Subject (Chicago, 2024)
Jaeyoon Park
An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the U.S. National Cancer Institute (Columbia, 2024)
Natalie B. Aviles
Transformed States: Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture, 1990–2020 (Rutgers, 2024)
Martin Halliwell
War & Medicine
Behead and Cure: Humanitarian Work in the Vietnam War (McGill-Queen’s, 2025)
Susan Armstrong-Reid [UNDER REVIEW]
Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs (Southern Illinois, 2025)
Guy R. Hasegawa
Doing Harm: How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Lost its Way in the War on Terror (McGill-Queen’s, 2024)
Roy Eidelson
Wounded for Life: Seven Union Veterans of the Civil War (Indiana, 2024)
Robert D. Hicks
Women & Gender
Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Princeton, 2026)
Katharine Park
The Apothecary’s Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity (California, 2026)
Karen Bloom Gevirtz
The Culture of Care in Britain since the Second World War (Bristol, 2025)
Bernice Martin
To the Artizans of England (1852) by Florence Nightingale (Bookmundo, 2025)
Edited by Rob van der Peet
Anatomical Forms: The Science of the Body in Early Modern Women’s Poetry (Penn State, 2025)
Whitney Sperrazza
Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States (North Carolina, 2025)
Jess Libow
Unhappy Mothers: Women, Motherhood, and Social Change in Postwar Britain (Manchester, 2025)
Sarah Crook