Catharine Coleborne Review Article Documenting Health: Contemporary Social and Cultural Histories of Medicine and Psychiatry Pamela Dale and Joseph Melling (eds), Mental Illness and Learning Disability since 1850: Finding a Place for Mental Disorder in the United Kingdom, London and New York, Routledge, 2006; pp. xi + 234; ISBN-13: 978 0 415 36491 1, ISBN-10: 0 414 36491 4 (hb) Lynette A. Jackson, Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908–1968, Ithaca, NY, and London, Cornell University Press, 2005; pp. xii + 230; ISBN 0 8014 8940 7 (pb) Pamela Michael and Charles Webster (eds), Health and Society in Twentieth- Century Wales, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2006; pp. xii + 332; ISBN 0 7083 1908 4 (hb) James E. Moran and David Wright (eds), Mental Health and Canadian Society: Historical Perspectives, Montreal and Kingston, London, and Ithaca, NY, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006; pp. xvi + 266; ISBN-13: 978 0 7735 3139 0, ISBN-10: 0 7735 3139 4 (pb) Carol Squiers, The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Illness and Healing, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, International Center of Photography, New York, Milbank Memorial Fund, New York and University of California Press, 2005; 256 pp; ISBN 0 520 24733 7 (pb) The social history of medicine has for some time been concerned with ‘history from below’, or the people’s history of health. People at the margins of good health, or at risk of poor health, have attracted historians’ attention for a number of reasons: their stories balance out older histories of the healers in medicine; their histories are important in political terms and allow political engagement with the themes of medicine and the state; and the very docu- menting of their experiences is perhaps quintessential ‘social history’. Gareth Williams, one of the contributors to Health and Society in Twentieth-Century Wales, argues that understanding health inequalities involves new ‘interpreta- tive and historical approaches, bringing together the stories of individuals and the histories of social structures in particular areas’ (299). And, as the edited collection Mental Illness and Learning Disability since 1850 shows, the social history of the mentally ill in Britain is still largely concerned with this process Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, Vol 42(4), 683–691. ISSN 0022–0094. DOI: 10.1177/0022009407082156 at University of Newcastle on January 16, 2016 jch.sagepub.com Downloaded from