The particular strength of this wonderful book lies in the abundant and fascinating primary sources mainly from the 18th century to the present. The study of music as a source of trauma is now well established, to the extent that there is really little new primary evidence appearing. This is because ‘the usual suspects’ are being rounded up, most notably the use of music in recent US anti-terrorist activities (a narrative which relentlessly exoticises sonic trauma, occluding the fact that it is also part of ordinary urban life). For this reason, the final chapter of this study is little more than a literature review, and even the subheadings echo other studies.

It is the coverage of the earlier periods that provides the most vividly arresting information, including the significance of the glass harmonica as a kind of late 18th century moral equivalent of metal backmasking (pp. 44–8), and the ‘modern piano plague’ and its supposedly debilitating effects on woman in the 19th century (pp. 75–80). The range of primary materials on which Kennaway draws is staggering, and I feel that the most significant achievement of the study is in gathering these disparate sources together under a coherent thesis. In aggregate they make a compelling argument in the emergence of urban modernity: that at any moment contemporary music is likely to have been regarded as a force for disruption which was increasingly medicalised.

I want to build on my enthusiasm for this book with some observations on historiographical modelling. The clue to Kennaway's approach is in the running title: ‘The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease’. The data are comprehensively contextualised in the larger history of ideas, as is the author's objective, so there is little sense of the role of material culture. He refers to urbanisation, modernisation, mass education, mass production, but in rather abstract forms. It is hardly fair to take issue with a study for not being something it doesn't set out to be, but there are many moments when his idea-centrism begs questions. It is a view of history as the linear sequence of ideas driving ideas: ‘The discourse of pathological music was thus the product of the new aesthetics of music’ (p. 53); or ideas evolving in some kind of autonomous trajectory: ‘femininity, sensuality and nerves in music went out of fashion’ (p. 51). He discusses the emergence of the idea of ‘Absolute Music’ rather as though it was a spontaneous evolution (p. 50). This is ‘idea-driven’ historical narrative. So, writing of the Edinburgh doctor John Brown, ‘his ideas were highly influential for a few years, especially in Germany, where his views seemed compatible with contemporary fashions for galvanism, Romantic Naturphilosophie and Vitalism’ (p. 33). As a summary of the interplay of ideas, this is neat and succinct. But I am left with a number of questions. Why did they emerge in this individual in 18th-century Scotland? Why did they not become influential in that place but in Germany (certainly not the only place where those three intellectual forces were in play)?

Similarly the analysis of the Wagner phenomenon, and the debates about the supposedly traumatic effects of his music. As so often, the closest this comes to anchoring itself in material conditions of time and place is the reference to the ‘modern world’ and its distinctive stresses. But if the ‘world’ was simply ‘modern’, why was the Wagner debate so historically (when is ‘modern’?) and geographically specific? Kennaway refers to anxieties about ‘Modern urban life, with its crime, substance abuse, perversion, and excess’ (p. 65) and Wagner's eroticism. But these anxieties were even greater in many conurbations where Wagnerism (an international phenomenon) was not invoked. What other factors, especially material ones, were in play? These would include, for example, the material means by which his music was circulated (shipping, print circulation, demographics). How significant is the fact that most of Wagner's celebrity was not the product of his public concerts, but of parlour-room piano reductions of his ‘greatest hits’? One corollary to this idea-driven approach is a kind of cultural homogenisation, bounded very simplistically by place and period. So, the claim that ‘the experience of defeat for Germany in 1918 intensified the yearning for musical order’ elides the internal heterogeneity that also produced the nihilism and studied disorder of Weimar cabaret and jazz.

The material actualities of ‘crime’ and ‘substance abuse’ referred to above help us to understand answers to the question: Why there? Why then? Consider the ‘idea’ that there was an outbreak of sexual, social and criminal depravity in the mid-19th century. Substance abuse (in the consumption of gin) and criminality had been on the increase, and indeed, at their peak, in England from the 18th century. And at least the second of these (and, indirectly, the first) did not actually reflect a significant shift among the underclasses to criminally antisocial inclinations. Rather, it was the sudden criminalisation of a range of customary rights, the ‘black acts’, which meant that what had hitherto been entirely acceptable and indeed necessary to subsist – like keeping the leavings of trades like shipbuilding (wood) or weaving (fabrics) – became a criminal and often capital offence against the rising shibboleth of private property that sustained the growth of capitalism. The rising power of legal over customary rights, of a material-based ideology of profit-driven functionalism, can help us to understand a complex reciprocity, a feedback loop, with the increasing pathologisation of ‘uneconomic’ practices like art, and the figure of the artist. Once the spokesman for social order in the Augustan ethos of the late 17th to the early 18th centuries, the artist becomes a potential threat to be discursively expelled or isolated in a society increasingly based on the sanctity of profit and private property. Here is how we may instructively link an idealist with a materialist historiography; equally important, that linkage avoids the vulgar Marxism of history driven inexorably by materialist (and technological) determinism.

I used the words ‘amplified’, and ‘feedback’. It is useful to think about a historical narrative which is not one of linear cause and effect, but is rather about feedback loops, probabilities, closed and open systems. A statement like ‘The development of bacteriology and modern public health led to an interest in the medical consequences of urban squalor’ (p. 67) presents a clear model of cause and effect, in which ‘ideas’ are the causative factor. Shouldn't it be at least in part the other way round? ‘The development of the medical consequences of urban squalor led to an interest in bacteriology and modern public health’. But I am suggesting that neither of these simple alternatives has explanatory power on its own. They feed back into and amplify each other, and if that means I have to say that I don't fully understand in detail how that works, I can only say that it has greater explanatory power than the simplistic linear models.

These observations are also reflected, I think, in the kinds of secondary sources deployed; they too lean towards ‘history-of-ideas’, and there are occasions when I missed more empirical studies, like Walser (Reference Walser1993) and Berger (Reference Berger1999) on Metal, Salmi on Wagnerism (Reference Salmi2005), or Kater (Reference Kater1992) and Birdsall (Reference Birdsall2012) on sound and music in the Third Reich. Such studies as these might have established links between ideas and materiality. These comments are not to diminish what I think is a very stimulating study, certainly one of the most commanding in the growing field of sound and trauma. It provides a particularly well defined platform for some observations about historiography precisely because it explicitly proclaims itself as a history of ideas. These ideas go well beyond music and is in fact part of the Ashgate series ‘The History of Medicine in Context’. It is perhaps best described as a study of the changing social role of medicine and its discourses, with particular reference to music.