Books for Review

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. 

Ancient Medicine

Medicine and Empire in the Roman World (Cambridge, 2026)
Rebecca Flemming

Aristotle, Aristotelianism and Ancient Medicine (Cambridge, 2026)
Philip J. van der Eijk

Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton, 2026)
Anna Bonnell Freidin

A Womb of One’s Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome (California, 2026)
Tara Mulder

The Oxford Handbook of Galen (Oxford, 2024)
P.N. Singer and Ralph M. Rosen

Consumption, Nutrition & Addiction

Taking Drugs in the Sun King’s Reign (Chicago, 2027)
E.C. Spary

The Lion’s Share: Scientific Nutrition and the British World System (Chicago, 2027)
Alma Igra

Cities of Drugs: The Origins of Global Trafficking in the Twentieth Century (McGill-Queen’s, 2026)
Edited by Paul Gootenberg

Fortified Bodies: Nutrition for National Defense in World War II and the Cold War (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Hannah LeBlanc

Nutritional Imperialism: How Science Turned Difference into Sickness in China (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Hilary A. Smith

Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs (Chicago, 2026)
Emily Dufton

Globalizing Chocolate and Tobacco: Medical Exchange in the Early Modern World (Bucknell, 2026)
Susan G. Polansky

Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers (Oxford, 2026)
Benjamin Robert Sigel

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

The State Drug: Theriac, Pharmacy, and Politics in Early Modern Italy (Harvard, 2025)
Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore

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

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 [UNDER REVIEW]

On Addiction: Insights from History, Ethnography, and Critical Theory (Duke, 2024)
Darin Weinberg

Embodied Histories

Sick jokes: Visual histories of humour, health and the body (Manchester, 2026)
Edited by Christine Slobogin, Katie Snow and Laura Cowley

The Fox, the Shrew, and You: How Brains Evolved (Princeton, 2026)
Rogier Mars

The Politics of the Table: Nutrition and the Body in Modern Germany (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Kristen Ann Ehrenberger

Fat and the Body in the Long Nineteenth Century: Meanings, Measures, and Representations (Toronto, 2025)
Edited by Amy Shaw and Lynn Kennedy

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

Epidemics/Pandemics

Hidden Terrors: The Scourge of Cholera in Jackson’s America (Oxford, 2026)
Paul Skelton

The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America (North Carolina, 2026)
Thomas G. Andrews

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 [UNDER REVIEW]

The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2026)
Andrew M. Wehrman [UNDER REVIEW]

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

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

Albert Moll: Mind, Sex, Ethics (McGill-Queen’s, 2026)
Andreas-Holger Maehle

Taking Drugs in the Sun King’s Reign (Chicago, 2026)
E. C. Spary

The Lion’s Share: Scientific Nutrition and the British World System (Chicago, 2026)
Alma Igra

Frenzy in Early Modern England: Madness, Brain Disease and the Soul (Cambridge, 2026)
Philippa Carter

For Your Health and Ours: An Eastern European History of Global Health (Oxford, 2026)
Sara Silverstein

Healthcare in Northern Ireland, 1921-73: Politics, policies and management (Manchester, 2026)
Donnacha Seán Lucey

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 [UNDER REVIEW]

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

The State Drug: Theriac, Pharmacy, and Politics in Early Modern Italy (Harvard, 2025)
Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore

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

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

Practitioners, Healers & Workers

The Labour of Care: Canada’s Health Care Workers, 1945–2020 (Toronto, 2026)
Peter Twohig

Albert Moll: Mind, Sex, Ethics (McGill-Queen’s, 2026)
Andreas-Holger Maehle

Healers and politics in African history (Manchester, 2026)
Edited by Markku Hokkanen, Musa Sadock, Philip J. Havik and Benson A. Mulemi

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]

Queer Health

Trans Brazil: The Hidden Histories That Transformed a Nation (North Carolina, 2026)
José Amador

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

Race, Empire & Colonialism

Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality (Chicago, 2026)
Pablo F. Gómez

Disabled Empire: The Colonial Body in First World War Britain (Chicago, 2026)
Hilary R. Buxton

Medicine and Empire in the Roman World (Cambridge, 2026)
Rebecca Flemming

Parasitic Empires: Infection, Insularity, Inter-Imperiality, 1880–2022 (North Carolina, 2026)
Bassam Sidiki

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 [UNDER REVIEW]

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

Sexual Health, Reproduction & Pediatrics

Making Babies Count: The Sheppard-Towner Act and Building the Modern Administrative State (Cambridge, 2026)
Michelle Bezark

Monstrous Conceptions: A History of Race, Disability, and Reproductive Medicine in the United States (Columbia, 2026)
Miriam Rich

A Womb of One’s Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome (California, 2026)
Tara Mulder

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 [UNDER REVIEW]

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

United States

Malady of Monoculture: Pellagra, Public Health, and the Pathologies of Cotton’s Capitalism (Chicago, 2026)
Dana Landress

The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments (Chicago, 2026)
Laura Stark

Hidden Terrors: The Scourge of Cholera in Jackson’s America (Oxford, 2026)
Paul Skelton

Monstrous Conceptions: A History of Race, Disability, and Reproductive Medicine in the United States (Columbia, 2026)
Miriam Rich

Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since the 1960s (Columbia, 2026)
Nicholas Freudenberg

Making Babies Count: The Sheppard-Towner Act and Building the Modern Administrative State (Cambridge, 2026)
Michelle Bezark

Stabilizing Empire: Psychopharmacy in the US War on Terror (California, 2026)
Jocelyn Lim Chua

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 [UNDER REVIEW]

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