Rather than ruminating on the contested question of what, exactly, made the nineteenth century ‘modern’, Anxious Times takes a more fertile and interesting approach, namely what was it about modernity that caused the Victorians such anxiety? And, by extension, what the Victorians thought about modernity. This is a rigorous and innovative study of the seemingly detrimental impact of modernity on the Victorians’ physical, emotional and mental well-being. Their concerns fanned out across medicine, science and popular culture, generating considerable attention on the state of occupational and public health, the environment, national efficiency and even the future of humanity itself. We understand these crises all too well. They continue to shape the way we think about our own place in the modern world. In an age plagued by uncertainties about the future – about industrialization's impact on fragile ecosystems and our role in a looming environmental crisis – Anxious Times could not be timelier. As the book itself concludes, ‘tracking between the two eras, one can easily trace similitudes, sometimes startling in their seeming replication’ (p. 220). We and the Victorians face the same fundamental problem: how to deal with ‘the emergence of the startlingly new, the unprecedented’ (p. 23). The idea that modern society hurtles through uncharted territory was (and remains) exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure.

Like Diseases of Modern Life, the ERC-funded project from which Anxious Times emerged, this book is expertly interdisciplinary, drawing together critical approaches from across the medical humanities to explore the far-reaching impact of technological innovation, urbanization and rapid industrialization, faster travel and global communication, and humanity's relationship with its social and physical environments. Throughout Anxious Times, the authors emphasize the role of print culture in exacerbating all manner of anxieties about these manifestations of modernity. The chapters work well, both individually and together. Each draws heavily upon the popular and medical press, examining the incidence or severity of imagined biomedical and social problems – how, why and with what consequences those problems occupied the press and public discourse.

Chapter 1 uses occupational health as a lens on the changing relationship between modernity and workplace illness, drawing deftly on treatises by prominent medical authors like Charles Turner Thackrah. The chapter might have benefited from slightly more attention to the fertile overlaps between labour history and the social history of medicine, such as the role played by trade unions in consolidating links between occupational health and perceptions of the workplace as potentially harmful. Despite a disproportionate focus in the popular and medical press on the health of labourers in a cluster of heavy industries, there were nonetheless health concerns across a wide variety of skilled and unskilled labour. For example, as a complement to Chapter 5's focus on the centrality of childhood health in debates over national efficiency and prosperity, Chapter 1 might have given slightly more attention to the medical and social concerns over children's occupational health. But overall, these are minor gaps. The chapter expertly demonstrates not only how accelerating industrialization and mechanization inspired new fears for workers’ health but also how industrial working conditions became entwined with Britain's imperial project and its preoccupation with national efficiency.

As Chapter 2 reveals, concerns over the health impacts of modernity's new workplaces and work patterns were not limited to the labouring classes. This chapter maps the changes in mortality, morbidity and patient care that accompanied developments in telecommunication technologies, especially among white-collar professions. These technologies had undenied benefits, but they were also thought to have a variety of potential harms. Telephonic communication opened up new types of patient care, but it also disrupted health professionals’ established workloads, practices and assumptions. Just as today's video-conferencing technologies help to connect geographically remote patients with much-needed healthcare, so too did Victorians recognize the ability of the telephone to bridge physical distance between doctors and their patients. But they also worried about its limitations – about the fact that patients’ physical symptoms could not be observed first-hand, thereby making consulting physicians even more reliant on patients’ accounts of illness (which were considered unreliable at the best of times).

These dualities and conflicts are developed further in Chapter 3, which explores how an increasingly mobile population gave rise to new concerns about disease transmission and the effectiveness of public-health strategies – something that remains of paramount importance for us in the face of increasing microbial resistance. The Victorian craze for health tourism stretched to breaking point the inadequate local infrastructure of popular resorts and spa towns. It brought sick and healthy populations into contact with one another at alarming rates, creating new opportunities for disease transmission. But whereas other areas of public-health debate centred around the responses of health authorities to unsanitary urban spaces and disease outbreaks, the spread of infection at seaside resorts and in spa towns prompted scrutiny and criticism of the personal responsibility of invalids and their families. Modern transport links, along with emerging ideas about germs and their transmission, helped to refocus medical scrutiny on the individual, rather than the environment, as the main source of contagion.

The mayhem created by new forms of spatial mobility was also the catalyst for growing fears over moral malaise. As we see in Chapter 4, anxious commentators assumed that the stresses and fast-paced nature of modern life gave rise to dipsomania, enabling secret drinking especially among middle- and upper-class women. Not only did new urban spaces offer opportunities for concealment. Men and women alike were also thought to be more inclined to succumb and become habituated to the hedonistic temptations on offer.

Themes of victimhood, constitutional weakness and degeneration continue in Chapter 5, which examines how schoolchildren were thought to be suffering from the ‘overpressure’ of ever-increasing educational demands and thus developing their own forms of occupational illness. Children were becoming cogs in an unfeeling industrial machine – mere units of productivity in larger competitive economic processes. Drawing upon a rich selection of fictional accounts and medical treatises, Chapter 5 explores how these child casualties of modernity came to embody Victorian fears about the future of the British nation and race. But anxieties over their schooling – specifically the quantities of materials that they had neither the energy nor time properly to ‘masticate’ – present fascinating comparisons with our own concerns about information overload in the digital age as well as the diminished potential of children in austerity Britain who regularly go to school hungry.

Just as we compulsively fret over the possible impacts of modern information technologies on the wiring of our own brains, so too did the Victorians see (and diagnose) mental strain everywhere. Broken nerves and depleted vitality were becoming proxies for wider concerns over the dangers of modern life. Chapter 6 explores how the Victorians believed the modern world to be creating artificial rhythms to which Britons were maladjusted, thereby necessitating revitalization and galvanization through chemical and physical stimulants. There are interesting parallels here between the elixirs and nostrums advertised to nervous Victorians and today's fashionable detoxes and superfoods that purport to purge the body of pollutants that come unavoidably with urban living.

At its heart, Anxious Times reveals how modernity could be both disruptive and oppressive, as well as an opportunity for improvement, experimentation and creativity. On the one hand, Victorians feared that human energy was finite, and that over-strain or nervousness resulted from the mind and body's inability to keep pace with modern life – that modernity could literally sap one's vitality. But at the same time, modern modes of transport and communication opened up access to resorts and spa towns to which sick persons and their families flocked for rest cures. Modernity caused sensory overload and unhealthy work patterns. But it also created new employment opportunities. Victorians believed that modernity facilitated new types of permissive, degenerative behaviour. But it also opened up new spaces for leisure, patient care and restorative excursions. Anxious Times eloquently captures these seeming incongruities and in so doing pushes the reader to pause and to reflect upon their own relationship with the modern world.