Book Reviews pointed in the direction of social and cultural concerns informing the government's scientific appointments. Instead, she treats governmental acceptance, and hygienists' rejection, of Koch's bacteriology as a self-evident example of practical benefit (on the government's side) versus ideological commitment (the hygienists). Yet a very different account has been given of the relations of hygiene, bacteriology and government in France by Bruno Latour in his Pasteurization of France. Both French and German bacteriology are conferred with institutional power, but in strikingly different ways. Yet no contrasts are drawn, let alone explanations offered. Not only does Mazumdar's approach obscure the social and cultural specificities of historical explanation; it also over-simplifies an explanatory framework. TWo philosophical interludes-one, a heuristically-effective opening on Kant; the other, a narrative-halting exposition of Mach's ideas of scientific understanding (the whole of chapter 8)-seem to be grafted onto the text. The author relies primarily on direct transmission of scientific styles to explain her subject's continuity: "it is almost impossible to exaggerate the determining effect of this mixture of technology and intellectual patterning that is passed from teacher to student" (p. 380). Her thematic exposition itself serves as proof of this claim. Still, does not such an explanation beg important questions? Why, for instance, was Landsteiner drawn to Gruber's unitarian perspective? Is there evidence, either in personal archives or in published work, that Landsteiner had some position of general philosophical inclination before he studied with Gruber (or even with Emil Fisher)? What of the numerous students who passed through the laboratories of Schleiden, Nageli, Landsteiner, etc., without being converted to the unitarian doctrine? Is not Mazumdar herself following the "successful progress" of an idea-even if it has been a "losing" idea? To demonstrate the persistence of thematic continuity, the author narrows her focus to exclude the multi-levelled historical complexities that might distract from her narrative's coherence. This does not mean that the narrative is simple. Sometimes, perhaps carried away by the internal complexities of her theme, Mazumdar plunges head-first into the scientific details of variations. Unfortunately, she often does this without providing the reader with insight into why such detail is significant. To take one example, she describes Landsteiner's chemical training in a style reminiscent of an organic chemistry text. Additionally, several pages are devoted to the ideas of the physical chemists who, by Mazumdar's admission, had no influence on Landsteiner at that time. Only later do we discover that the chemists' ideas link not to the eight previous chapters, but to several subsequent chapters. Without a clear statement of their relevance, these details can quickly overwhelm the narrative. The book could use a few more maps to guide the reader. Overall, Mazumdar has composed a fine piece that, despite some methodological limitations, will raise numerous questions for historians of science and medicine. Perhaps even for those of the next generation. Kim Pelis, Wellcome Institute and Science Museum, London Ala Young, The harmony of illusions: inventing post-traumatic stress disorder, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. x, 327, $35.00 (0-691-03352-8). In explicit opposition to the growing body of literature on the historical origins of Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Alan Young, a professor of anthropology at McGill University, sets out to deny the timelessness of traumatic memory. While a number of recent works have purported to demonstrate the existence of PTSD-like conditions decades or centuries before the American Psychiatric Association accepted PTSD in its 1980 diagnostic manual (DSMIII), Young offers, in contrast, a self-consciously historicist approach to trauma. Revealing major sources of discontinuity in the history of traumatic memory, he argues that the condition we know 253