Few events in the nineteenth century inspired fear and anxiety in the way that epidemics did, and among these, cholera was, as denominated by the 1852 Punch cartoon that appears on the cover of Pamela Gilbert's new book, the king of diseases. It is appropriate, then, that Gilbert, author of numerous publications on Victorian disease, has turned her attention to cholera in her latest work, intended as a companion to her recent The Citizen's Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (Columbus, OH, 2007). In Cholera and Nation, she argues that the language of nation and social body enabled medical and sanitary authorities both to represent the threat of cholera and also to consolidate their own power. The interdisciplinary cultural history she offers here illuminates the multiple narratives that intersect in cholera's representation—narratives about masculinity, addiction, professionalization, sanitation, social and political reform, and empire. As she tells us, one of her goals is to provide, through a generous supply of excerpts from primary material, “a sense of the discursive climate” (11) surrounding these representations of cholera, and indeed, a great part of Gilbert's achievement in this book is her skillful navigation of the numerous primary texts that relate to Victorian disease, as well as of the considerable secondary research that has already been done on these subjects. Through canny juxtapositions of critical and historical materials, she demonstrates the relevance of this disease's recurrence to multiple aspects of nineteenth-century culture.

Part 1 offers insight into the competing interests and shifting cultural landscapes that shaped public understandings of cholera from the 1830s to the 1860s. In a richly textured survey of clerical, medical, and radical perspectives on these epidemics, Gilbert traces the rise of the medical profession as a credible and influential force within the public sphere; over the same period, the church's power declined, and its early fire-and-brimstone language gave way to a more conciliatory approach by midcentury that merged the providential with the scientific. This section of the book also examines the fascinating and often overlooked responses of the working classes to these institutional and governmental attempts to control cholera's spread; excerpts of ballads and newspaper articles uncover some of the satire and resistance in these more radical reactions.

This historical foundation leads to what is perhaps the book's most original and compelling claim, concerning the relationship between the medical profession's rise and the concomitant shift in its attention to the social body and, by extension, the nation. In part 2, Gilbert draws on the scholarship of Christopher Hamlin and Mary Poovey in order to focus on medicine's claim to legitimacy through institutions and systems of certification and on the contemporaneous emergence of the sanitary sciences. She argues that sanitary reform allowed the medical community to speak to and treat not only the individual body but also the social body and, hence, to assert its voice in the public sphere. Moreover, the rhetorical link it established between the moral and physical condition of the nation's citizens enabled medical men to claim an authority that had once belonged only to the clergy. Gilbert then turns to the body itself and, developing an argument she introduced in The Citizen's Body, points out that cholera became increasingly gendered and racialized in its representation. The ideal, healthy body was consistently “male, English, imperial, closed, and active” (103), while the bodies of women, degenerate men, and colonial subjects—especially those in India—were seen as susceptible to disease.

Because, as she notes, cholera was rarely described in any detail in the period's literature, in part 3 she focuses instead on more oblique treatments of these same issues in fiction and poetry and, in particular, to the implicit and metaphorical representations of disease. These chapters reflect on the meanings of health and disease in George Eliot's oeuvre and in Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke, before settling into an extended examination of a lesser-known Kingsley work Two Years Ago. Here Gilbert succeeds in lending a sense of coherence to Kingsley's otherwise loose and sprawling novel about a cholera epidemic in Britain, the Crimean war, and slavery and abolitionism in the antebellum states, as she offers a persuasive reading of the motifs that unify these otherwise disparate subplots. Cholera, like slavery, functions as both a literal and figurative element of the plot, a sign of individual weakness and failure, as well as an occasion for emancipation through hard work and self-improvement. For the literary scholar, this section of the book will be of the greatest interest, and her capable handling of Two Years Ago will prove especially rewarding for the Kingsley scholar. At the same time, however, these final chapters drift furthest from the concerns that drive parts 1 and 2; their expansiveness, while accommodating the multiple and divergent focal points of Kingsley's novel, results in a discussion that feels at times only distantly related to the historical narrative so lucidly developed in the book's first half. Nonetheless, scholars of many stripes—historians of nineteenth-century politics and culture, literary critics, readers interested in the development of medicine and public health—will find material in Cholera and Nation that speaks to their interests and will surely appreciate its author's wide-ranging research and encompassing approach.