The development of the field of medical humanities owes much to Michel Foucault's analysis and the way his writings call for a recalibration of the focus on the institutions of medicine and the way individual patients are approached and treated. Thanks to the concepts of biopower and biopolitics that Foucault developed to study the body and its regulation by government institutions, there has been a growth in scholarship that examines the materiality of the body and its cultural histories. Fay Bound Alberti's book advocates a holistic approach to the body. In the introduction, she analyses the ancient theory of the humours and how they influenced a person's physiological and emotional balance. Thanks to the development of the biomedical sciences from the nineteenth century onward, the brain became the centre of the self and emotions. Nonetheless, Alberti argues that Western medicine's separation of mind and body cannot cater adequately for the current state of affairs when around 25 per cent of the population in Britain suffer from mental illness and when other chronic diseases, some of them such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes linked to a modern lifestyle, affect a large part of the population and are particularly burdensome for the National Health Service.

Alberti deploys humour and playfulness of style to contextualize the body and its parts in relation to changes in the history of medicine and pathology and how they in turn have affected perceptions, judgements and reassessments as regards the most intimate or most exposed parts of our bodies. Although the book mainly covers the UK and North America, the discussion of the selected body parts takes a materialist, transhistorical and transcultural approach. The book also draws on the methodologies of the history of emotions and of cultural and literary history. Her sources are wide-ranging, from the biomedical sciences and high culture (for instance, Shakespeare's Hamlet (1599–1601), as the title suggests) to the popular press and culture. Characteristically, the chapter on the heart informs us that a possible source for the shape of hearts used in popular iconography (e.g. Saint Valentine's cards) may be the silphium seed, which was used as contraceptive in classical antiquity.

What is particularly notable in Alberti's book is the demythologization of a number of concepts and judgements about the female body. As she clarifies, the book focuses on the female body and examines the way it has been perceived or abused. The chapter on the tongue, for instance, includes an illustration of an old punishing device for nagging women that prevented them from speaking (p. 162). As for the stereotypes about women's brains being innately wired to be multitasking or showing empathy, these are debunked in the chapter that is devoted to new scientific discoveries about the brain. Alberti points out that the theory of neuroplasticity can help us understand that these parts develop more because women are socially expected to behave in this way and they use the corresponding parts of the brain more frequently. The chapter that deals with the female breast is called ‘Beauty and the breast: from paraffin to PIP’. After outlining the history of experiments in the field of breast implants in the USA and the UK, Alberti refers to the numerous side effects caused by the materials used to produce the implants. She notes the moral dilemma when faulty PIP implants are removed by the National Health Service and stresses the need for regulation of the cosmetic industry and how it exploits men's and women's insecurities and impulses to correct their penises, breasts and labia.

The chapter on genitalia outlines how the female sex organs have been historically represented and investigated. Particularly striking is the reappraisal of the female anatomy by the Australian urologist Helen O'Connell, who discovered by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that the clitoris consists both of the external component and a longer internal complex one. Although this chapter covers an admirable wealth of material, it does not examine the implications for the female body of the new developments in fertility and reproduction, including transplanted wombs; nor does it explore the history of contraception and its impact on women's health. Given that in 1922 Marie Stopes described the birth control movement as the most important social movement of the time, owing to the improvements it brought to women's lives thanks to well-paced pregnancies, and that nowadays the fertility industry is thriving with even more women becoming mothers at a later age, readers of Alberti's book would have been eager to read her approach to these topics.

Other chapters deal with the spine and its deformities, the heart, the gut, the brain, the skin. The book is highly readable and explains scientific discoveries clearly. Some of the most intriguing discoveries are the establishment of a brain in the gut, the enteric nervous system (ENS), with around 600 million neurons, which govern a person's emotional (depression and anxiety) and physiological well-being (obesity), and the proposal made by the US-based Institute of Heartmath, and Andrew Armour in particular, regarding the heart's brain and cellular memory, which might justify the popular association of the heart as the seat of emotions and even the soul. As Alberti notes, ‘the heart and the gut provide frameworks for alternative versions of the self’ (p. 202). However, she also clarifies that her emphasis is on ‘the ways scientific frameworks evolve and are accepted or rejected according to prevailing metaphysical and scientific frameworks’ (p. 110). Indeed, her book offers a lucid account of the evolution of such frameworks and the competitive discourses surrounding them and how they affect the study and treatment of the body as a whole. The book's conclusion proposes a new framework that will focus on the reinvigoration of the body through the principles of integrative medicine and holism and their focus on acceptance, empathy, healing, nourishment, culture. Her main claim is that ‘as embodied beings, we are surely more than the sum of our parts’ (p. 212) and that the ancient Greek Epicurean philosophy's emphasis on the positivity of pleasure might be a way to confront contemporary health burdens that partly relate to the separation of mind and body.