In 1948, as the Cold War exerted an ever greater influence over day-to-day life in the United States, Life magazine ran an article on John Foster Dulles, the man who, if all the predictions about the forthcoming presidential election were correct, would soon be installed as Secretary of State. Depicting Dulles as being imbued with the sort of characteristics that made him ideally suited to prosecute the nation's foreign policy in a time of international tension, the largely favourable article was illustrated with a series of photos of Dulles at work and leisure. One of these was particularly eye-catching. Dulles is shown, away from the office, in casual trousers, no tie, and with his shirt sleeves rolled up, heartily cleaving a log in two with an axe. “Chopping wood,” the caption notes, “provides [a] healthy form of exercise for the prospective secretary. Here he lays lustily into a log at home near Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.” Though lacking subtlety, its meaning was abundantly clear: the sort of masculine qualities demonstrated by Dulles in the photo were deemed highly desirable in someone likely to be leading the charge against Soviet Communism in the years ahead. The strength and vigour apparent in Dulles's bodily performance, in other words, was a clear indicator of more general American strength and power.

As Emily Rosenberg and Shannon Fitzpatrick's timely edited collection amply demonstrates, this was a common utilization of a particular body to denote meaning and power about international affairs. The health of the nation and the way it was understood in the twentieth century, the essays in their collection demonstrate, was often framed by references to particular bodies and images. It is a much-needed and long-overdue collection, for while scholars of US foreign relations and studies of America in the world have embraced the cultural turn, and developed arguments that factor aspects such as race, gender and masculinity into their narratives of US power, too little work has been done on the way that images and perceptions of physical health impacted upon this. As this book demonstrates, however, there is now enough work of this type emerging for scholars to begin to think more expansively about this issue. Embracing interdisciplinary methodologies, which sees the use of traditional archival sources combined with imaginative readings of visual images and texts, the essays collected here provide a clear illustration of how rich this seam of historical research can be. Socially constructed meanings of power and well-being, as represented through perceptions and appraisals of the human form, were an important part of America's engagement with the world in the century after 1898.

At times, particularly in the Cold War, this would see exemplars of physical fitness and those deemed aesthetically pleasing held up as being symptomatic of all that was good and desirable about America. This is a point made in Rosenberg's compelling chapter on the way that a photo essay entitled “The American Look,” published by Life in 1945, used a series of photos of what it deemed to be perfect examples of American womanhood to convey a sense of American success and prosperity. The essay, Rosenberg notes, “examines the meanings involved in inscribing the nation onto particular women's bodies styled as the American look” (189). What this meant in practice was an emphasis on physical attributes that were believed to be emblematic of the nation's well-being. Thus one photo of seven women, smiling broadly, is accompanied by the tagline “A clean, ready smile, with teeth which show the result of plenty of milk and orange juice and of braces when young, is the badge of the American girl” (192); another, taken from the rear, featuring a single woman in shorts, pushing a bike up a hill, highlights the fact that “their legs are long” and that this, too, was a mark of a prosperous and healthy nation (199). But of course the situation was never quite that straightforward. Franklin Roosevelt, as demonstrated in Frank Costigliola's essay, effectively combated the afflictions caused by polio and was able to project the “image of a charming, vigorous man on the move” where he “deployed camouflage, a phalanx of aides, emotional control, jaw-clenching exertion, and – not least – a flexible performance of his masculine identity” in an effort to embrace the idea that he was a “synecdoche of the nation” (142).

At other times, particularly when issues of immigration and the blurring of racial boundaries were evident, this could lead to concerns about whether the “ideal” American body was being corrupted by the pestilent and disease-ridden nature of various “others.” Paul Kramer's essay, on the negative connotations prompted by disclosures about the use of local prostitutes by American troops in the Philippines after 1898, demonstrates how concerns about the spread of venereal disease were equated with concerns about the health of the nation more broadly. “To talk about the bodies of U.S. soldiers and the hazards that sapped their force and purity,” Kramer writes, “was also to talk about the ‘body’ of U.S. empire at a moment when that body's limits, constitution, and vulnerabilities were being hotly disputed” (19). Similarly, Natalia Molina's contribution details the recurrent way that fears of disease have come to shape perceptions about the US–Mexican border across the last century. “Disease, or just the threat of it,” she writes, “have marked Mexicans as foreign, just as much as phenotype, native language, accent or clothing,” in ways that have had “long-term effects on immigration policy, as well as on how Mexicans have been received in the United States” (173).

As with all edited collections, there are some essays that prove slightly less satisfying than others. Annessa Stagner's assessment of the way that US medical and psychiatric specialists sought to define shell shock as a curable phenomenon after World War I, which she argues helped to contribute to a general sense of national exceptionalism, is weakened by its focus on notions of success when, at the same time, President Woodrow Wilson was in the midst of a chronic decline in his health. A widespread belief that a capacity to cure shell shock indicated American distinctiveness and strength was, surely, undermined by the fact that Wilson was so incapacitated following a severe series of strokes in 1919. Molina's otherwise persuasive account of the effects that perceptions of illness had on US views of Mexican immigrants, meanwhile, is less compelling when it considers the contemporary phenomenon of medical deportations, because although these may well be motivated by similar fears to previous episodes, the account provided does not ultimately demonstrate that these deportations are based on concerns prompted by disease.

These, though, are very minor criticisms of two thought-provoking essays in an important and timely collection. The editors have done a superb job in compiling the contributions, the level of coherence between the essays is highly impressive, and it is to be hoped that the collection prompts far greater scholarly engagement with the impact that perceptions of illness, the body, and well-being have had on America's engagement with the wider world.