Arnaud's book stands in clear contrast to the usual treatment of the history of hysteria by historians of medicine; it focuses neither on institutions nor on personalities, but on rhetorical and discursive strategies. Arnaud opens her book by stating that it will not examine hysteria from the standpoint of the history of medical knowledge or consider efforts to cure hysteria. Instead, her approach is to treat hysteria as a category and to examine how what she calls the ‘enunciations’ of medical knowledge operated between 1670 and 1820. The introduction of the term ‘enunciation’ is used by the author as a means to consider the conceptual choices that make the construction of knowledge possible, and the writing, political incentives and audience development at stake in such writing. Hysteria is not being considered as a disease but from a broader perspective, as an example of a series of discursive practices used in the construction of a pathology.

Arnaud is interested in considering the epistemological and political stakes in the construction of hysteria conjointly, by analysing the strategies of accreditation and negotiation present in the writing practices themselves. In the eighteenth century, medical texts were not isolated from philosophical, literary and political texts, and Arnaud is interested in their interactions with medical discourse. The nosology, she argues, is only one of the medical writing genres of the eighteenth century. As she puts it, ‘I read medical texts as so many actors participating in epistemological, political, and social history’ (p. 3).

The creation of a category entails special attention to invoking lines of tradition, citation and metaphors in order to produce its success, and so this book examines several strands of activity: how specific meanings were created for this category, and to what end; the varieties of metaphor that characterized the pathology, and their selection; and the range of literary genres used by physicians to address their aristocratic audience. Dialogue, autobiography, epistolary treatises, consultation by correspondence and anecdotes reveal a new approach to the body, an approach not always connected to medical concerns. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, hysteria became an index of the refinement of the patient's education, way of life and sensibility. Finally, Arnaud analyses how physicians reframed their social and scientific status after the French Revolution, while simultaneously casting hysteria as a dangerous symptom of modernity. The connection of the pathology to the upper classes was severed, and a shift towards a medical discourse focused solely on women took place.

In her conclusion, Arnaud lays out her claims for her work. The genealogy of hysteria, she argues, shows us the creation of the possibility for something new, an event in the field of knowledge. By focusing closely on writing strategies, rhetorical figures and webs of citation, her work presents us with a history of science as a history of knowledge in the making. By analysing how those who speak position themselves by speaking, we see the perpetuation of systems of representation and accreditation, but also how they produce differences rather than reflecting them. Hysteria is thus an exemplary case of the determination of a medical category, and offers methodological options to the historian of science.

Arnaud's book is original and interdisciplinary, exploring a relatively obscure period in the history of hysteria. The focus on language and its power, while not novel, has not been applied to the concept of a pathology in this way (nor to this particularly rich and fascinating pathology). This is a well-researched and well-developed work, which will be of interest to a varied audience.