478 Book Reviews Nuncius © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/18253911-03402020 Stefanos Geroulanos, Todd Meyers, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe. Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018, 416 pp., 35$, ISBN: 9780226556598. That World War I entailed devastating and at the same time productive effects in every area of knowledge and society is not new in the context of Great War historiography. Cultural and intellectual history, along with the history of medicine in Continental Europe and Anglo-American countries have broadly highlighted the multifarious changes occurred in all aspects of human life dur- ing and after World War I. However, the originality of this volume consists not only in its object, namely the “ontology of the body at war” (p. 36), but also in the method adopted, which makes use of an extremely detailed research based on the study of medical archives and scientific literature without losing sight of the overall epistemological argument. The thesis of this ambitious inquiry into the “wounded body” revolves around the idea that the integrationist approach to the human organism as it had been conceived by physiology during World War I brings substantial onto- logical, epistemological, and political consequences, which cross a variety of disciplines and fields of knowledge. These are related not only to medicine, but also to social sciences like anthropology and social psychology, political econ- omy, philosophy and ethics. In other words, the body metaphors of “integra- tion”, “disintegration”, “disequilibrium”, “regulation”, “homeostasis” have given rise to an original “polygon” or web of concepts locating the individual in the world, whose theoretical import goes as far as to concern cybernetic and struc- turalism (chapter eight). This is an argument that shapes the same holistic historiographic perspective that characterizes Geroulanos and Meyers’ investi- gation, one which is interestingly inspired by authors such as Georges Canguil- hem, Hans Blumenberg, and Paul Veyne (n. 88, pp. 337–338). The actors of this epistemological history organized in ten chapters are the soldier-patients and the physicians, but above all “the human subject in gen- eral” (p. 5).The notion of individuality, in particular, is at the core of the inquiry and it is the specific object of the third chapter, which focuses on the notion of “case study” or “case history”. Indeed, during World War I the “case history” functions as a “narrative, analytical, administrative, and hermeneutic device” (p. 79), exceeding and disrupting existing diagnostic categories. With Carlo Ginzburg, the authors emphasize that the case imposes an “unsuppressable speculative margin” (p. 86) that reflects at the same time the brittleness of the body and of scientific knowledge. The fragility of extant categories is especially evident in the case of the “shell shock”, a functional disease, whose thorny def- inition appears as the emblem of medical thinking during the Great War. The