Gilman (liberal arts and sciences and psychology, Emory U.) examines why social problems like addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, racial predisposition for illness, surgery and beauty,
and electrotherapy, which used to be historical concerns, are reappearing in the twenty-first century. He considers historical and contemporary debates about the stigma associated with
diseases, the socio-political implications of the reappearance of such diseases, how certain diseases are seen as dangerous at different times, and how they are affected by national, regional,
and cultural moral panics. He particularly looks at the reappearance of the category of race in scientific analysis, its cultural implications, and its conversion into ethnicity, and specific
topics like recent claims that Jews have a genetic resistance to alcoholism; sexually transmitted diseases, race, and sex; Jewish identity and sickness in the nineteenth century; aesthetic
surgery and beauty in China; ethnicity and bilingualism; and Freud, Jewishness, and psychoanalysis. Annotation 穢2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
