Body & Society

http://bod.sagepub.com Book Review: The Most Secret Quintessence of Life by Chandak Sengoopta Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 354, ISBN 0226748634
Ericka Johnson Body Society 2007; 13; 114 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X070130040702 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bod.sagepub.com

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The Most Secret Quintessence of Life by Chandak Sengoopta Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 354, ISBN 0226748634 Reviewed by Ericka Johnson, Linkping University, Sweden
The rejuvenating effects of Viagra have received extraordinary media attention in the last ten years, and the hype they have generated would lead one to believe that the little blue pill is not only a Godsend for men with a medical condition called erectile dysfunction, but also a rarely matched breakthrough for medical science. But when reading the Viagra phenomenon as an attempt to regain functions associated with youth and vitality, instead of merely achieve an erection, this blockbuster pharmaceutical becomes only a recent addition to the plethora of medical and scientic cures for ageing. And if one considers Viagra in this light, Chandak Sengooptas latest book, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life, is an important work to help understand the historical interactions and divergences between the clinic and the lab in research that addresses the desire for everlasting youth. It examines the history of endocrine hypotheses of sex gland function between the years 18501950 (p. 6). It charts how scientists, doctors and patients came to think about the testicles, ovaries and their secretions as that which determines who we are, and in particular, how we are sexed. Starting with a brief description of gonad research before the endocrine era, Sengoopta begins the book by discussing nineteenth-century medicines fascination with the ovary and apparent disinterest in the testicle. This sets the stage for the research that comprises the majority of this books focus, when medical science began to turn attention to the internal secretions of the gonads and their rejuvenating effects. Early on in the book, the reader is led through example after example of fascinating attempts to transplant ovaries and testicles in cocks, rabbits, monkeys, dogs, guinea pigs and humans as the eld of endocrinology began to take shape. In this research testicles were at least as interesting as ovaries, and their rejuvenating inuence, both as whole organs and as animal derived testicular extracts injected into humans, were discussed and applauded, both in the medical and scientic communities as well as in popular media and literature (all of which serve as sources for this book, attesting to the incredible breadth of research upon which it is based). Of particular interest is the development of the Steinach operation (primarily during the interwar period), to which a great deal of attention is rightly dedicated in the book. Eugen Steinach devised a method of giving a male patient a more or less massive and continuous dose of his own gonadal hormone (p. 85) by a surgical procedure that vaguely resembles what is known today as a vasectomy. And while there was some debate about the actual success of this procedure, it was a widely publicized operation with some well-known patients, including Freud and Yeats, attesting to its rejuvenating effects. The discussion of the Steinach operation leads the book into the area of sexuality and ageing, in which Sengoopta discusses the links between glandular rejuvenation and the glandular treatment of homosexuality, and the masculinity construction that was being achieved with these medical procedures. When research into the sex glands helped develop hormonal treatments for homosexuality or ageing, it was also reconstructing masculinity and femininity into glandular states that could be manipulated (p. 113). Sengoopta shows that: With the dawn of the glandular age, effeminacy or decrepitude were no longer necessarily irreversible. The marvellous new techniques of glandular science promised to transform the effeminate, the homosexual, and the decrepit not into supermen or superwomen but into Everyman and Everywoman as represented in the cultural imagination of the era. And that, ultimately, was the reason why the new chemical understanding of gender turned out to be less destabilizing than conservative. (p. 115)

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However, research into the transformative powers of the testicles and ovaries was more difcult to map and manipulate than early proponents would have suggested, as was the actual manipulation of the sexual body. Sengoopta details how, starting in the late 1930s, the eld of gonadal research became complicated by the inclusion of the entire endocrine system, in particular the pituitary gland. Or, as he writes on p. 119, Yesterdays virtuoso soloists were now demoted to being mere members of the endocrine orchestra . . . under the baton of the master gland, the pituitary. Construction of the male and female bodies as hormonally separate also took a blow during this period, with the discovery that stallions produced more oestrogen than non-pregnant mares, and men had traces of female hormones in their urine (p. 137). The nal empirical chapter of The Most Secret Quintessence of Life details how the division of labour between the laboratory and the clinic took form in the interwar period and how biochemistry developed into a eld largely supported by the pharmaceutical industry while clinicians retreated from frontline research and instead took on the role of authenticator, prescribing the new products to patients (p. 154). A particularly important contribution this book makes is the inclusion of extensive Central European sources. The authors familiarity with German-language primary sources is also a great addition to eld, not least because much of the research on endocrine hypotheses of sex came from the work of clinicians, laboratory scientists and gynaecologists in Central Europe (p. 7). Sengooptas book is about the rejuvenating technologies of a century ago, but it encourages one to ask about the rejuvenating effects of current pharmaceutical approaches to successful ageing like Viagra, and to contextualize recent medical interest in andropause or ADAM Androgen Deciency in the Ageing Male against earlier work with ageing and masculinity. Today ADAM is a physiological disorder that is (again) treated with testosterone, although both the existence of the disorder and the effectiveness of the treatment is still seen as controversial (Marshall, 2006: 352). Sengooptas close and elaborate discussion of the history of endocrine hypotheses of sex gland function gives those of us examining cultural and medical responses to ageing and sexuality a useful historical background to the eld, and a rich offering of reections about virility, masculinity and sexuality from a different time period. Take, for example, the quote Sengoopta relays from physician Ernest Starling in 1923, who claimed that virility does not mean simply the power of propagation, but connotes the whole part played by man in his work within the community (p. 100). It is mirrored by Sengooptas assertion that Steinachs research had one fundamental premise: the surgical or chemical restitution of masculinity. True males were not simply virile but also strong, energetic, active, courageous, creative, libidinous, and heterosexual (p. 113). The procedures he and his colleagues were developing for rejuvenation were addressing deeper issues than mere erectile dysfunction. This is certainly a broader approach to virility than that addressed by Viagra today . . . or so it might seem, until one analyses the images in marketing material for Viagra, which seems to suggest that the pill can not only cure erectile dysfunction but also create men who are strong, energetic, active, courageous, creative, libidinous, and [in most advertisements] heterosexual. In both the examples given in Sengooptas book and in the current work on ADAM and erectile dysfunction, the concept of rejuvenation speaks to the plasticization of the body that the body is modiable, as Sengoopta states (p. 6). Sengoopta also points out that rejuvenation highlights specic understandings and constructions of the gendered and sexed body. However and this is my only critique of the book he really does not take an analysis of these issues as far as he could. He pays tribute to the work of Nelly Oudshoorn, Adele Clarke and Anne Fausto-Sterling, but does not implement the theoretical inspiration he claims they have given him as far as one would like. His material has much to say about how we imagine and manipulate the body, and the reader is left feeling that there is more to be done with these ideas based on the work he has presented. On the other hand, there can be more books to come. The Most Secret Quintessence of Life is a very well-researched and well-written history of endocrine research. It will be welcomed by both historians of medicine and those in Science, Technology and Society who are also working with medicine and the body. Likewise, it will surely inspire more analysis and further questions, and I look forward to reading the future work it facilitates and encourages.

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Reference
Marshall, B. (2006) The New Virility: Viagra, Male Aging and Sexual Function, Sexualities 9(3): 34562. Ericka Johnson is a postdoctoral researcher at the Dept. of Science and Technology Studies, Gteborg University, Sweden. She is currently studying the biomedicalization of Swedish masculinities and Viagra. Her previous work includes Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband: RussianAmerican Internet Romance (Duke University Press, 2007) and Situating Simulators: The Integration of Simulators in Medical Practice (Arkiv, 2004).

Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place by Nirmal Puwar Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004, pp. 187, ISBN 1859736599 Reviewed by Carolyn Pedwell, Gender Institute, London School of Economics
In a context in which women and racialized minorities are increasingly entering spaces in the public realm traditionally occupied by white men, Space Invaders provides a compelling critique of discourses that continue to reduce diversity and equality to the inclusion of different bodies. Author Nirmal Puwar argues that the tendency to equate the inclusion of these bodies with social transformation presumes problematically that women and ethnic minorities are homogenous groupings that can generate a mimetic politics from their shared experiences (p. 149). This dominant rhetoric also fails to examine the wider institutional changes required to address the white, masculine ideal (masquerading as universal) which is now deeply embedded in the institutional practices of a host of professional and political spaces, from the art world, to academia, to parliament. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including interviews with 100 MPs and civil servants, Space Invaders offers an important and timely contribution to literatures concerned with diversity, social policy, organizational behaviour, political institutions, political theory, cultural representation and embodiment. Bypassing the overly quantitative methods traditionally employed to explore gendered and racialized dynamics within organizations, Puwar focuses on lived experience, somatic encounters and embodied ritual. She argues that the entrance into professional spaces of women and non-whites reveals how privileged positions have historically been reserved for specic kinds of bodies (p. 144). Through being noticed as matter out of place, these space invaders interrogate the liberal assertion that bodies do not matter and that positions are constituted in neutered, natural, colourless terms and highlight the embodied nature of these positions (p. 144). As marked bodies, their every gesture, movement and utterance is submitted to super-surveillance (p. 11). Understood as lacking, they are pressured to work twice as hard to be accepted, aware that any mistakes they make can be seen as expressive of their gender or race (p. 145). Gendered and racialized subjects thus bear a burden of representation, as well as a burden of doubt within professional spaces. Engaging with post-structuralist and postcolonial discourses on performativity, the book offers an important assessment of the material limitations of mimicry as a critical practice. As performative accomplishments, gendered and racialized identities and forms of bodily presentation are open to processes of parody, mimicry and rescripting, and hence to the possibility of subversion (p. 150). However, whether within the House of Commons, the civil service or other institutions, this subversion is always articulated within strictly dened boundaries (p. 151). If performances are too

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