Imagine that the author of Circulated Bodies introduces herself at a cocktail party, saying that she is a historian or, more precisely, a historical sociologist of modern Japanese medicine and has just published her thesis. Her interlocutors smile, say something patronizing about how hard it is to get something published, and ask what her book is about. As she tells them, the smiles on their faces freeze: her book is a scholarly treatment of corpses. Oh my!
Although the study of dead bodies might sound odd or embarrassing, that impression vanishes immediately after one begins reading this excellent study, a tour de force in the historical sociology of bodies.
