This book is an important contribution to the emerging scholarly consensus about the importance of the first half of the 20th century to the creation of modern Iran. Cyrus Schayegh argues that a key segment of what he terms “the modern middle class”—those engaged in medicine and public health—leveraged their access to new cultural media and the expanding power of the state, especially during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi. They did so to enhance their own cultural and economic capital on the basis of their knowledge of applied science adapted from modern European models. This class of Iranians also set the terms of a modernist discourse that shaped the state's social and economic policy, including that of national education, in ways that are still felt today.

Schayegh draws on literature generated by doctors, bureaucrats, and public-health professionals, including their peer-reviewed publications and opinion pieces as well as government reports they authored. Another source Schayegh deftly uses in describing legal changes favored by the modern middle class are transcripts of the Iranian parliamentary debates. He supplements these Iranian primary sources with German, French, and British diplomatic archives and with American Presbyterian missionary records. Absent are American diplomatic sources and, more important, the many published document compilations from Iranian state archives that have been steadily released since the 1990s. These compilations include government memos dating from the 1930s and 1940s that offer information on individuals prominent in Schayegh's narrative, such as ʿAli Akbar Siyasi. Such documents would likely confirm the influence of people like Siyasi on a wide range of state initiatives and policies and further illustrate their reactions to some of the messy details of daily life in Iran at the time.

The first chapter, which provides historical background, is succinctly written but has two weaknesses. First, Schayegh does not offer any coverage of the Qajars’ public-health efforts prior to the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1906). However insufficient or abortive such efforts were, discussion of them would have provided useful context for what followed in the late constitutional and early Pahlavi periods. Some of this background is covered in the fourth chapter, but including an expanded narrative earlier in the book would have been a better choice. Second, Chapter 1 closes with a mention of increased education and literacy from 1925 to 1941 but leaves out the important fact that illiteracy was estimated to be as high as 87 percent in 1950 despite efforts in the early Pahlavi period. This would necessarily limit or delay the diffusion of modernist ideas to the wider society despite “public-education” campaigns (i.e., propaganda not formal education). The one element of a mass-media campaign that could overcome the problem of illiteracy, Radio Tehran, did not begin its broadcasts (which included health and hygiene education) until 1940. Although this reviewer absolutely agrees with Schayegh on the crucial importance of the early Pahlavi period in shaping modernity, there should be some caution about the immediate influence of modernist thinking beyond the elite levels of education and governance (which, to be fair, is consistently the focus of the book).

The second chapter is a truly masterful analysis of the terrain in which the modern middle class sought to create cultural capital. Schayegh connects debates on such seemingly disparate topics as poetry and science into a coherent cultural landscape. The third chapter highlights how specific legal changes governing public health, medical practice, and education favored the kind of professional expertise members of the modern middle class had acquired. Through these legal changes, the state endorsed and funded policies and institutions that would expand the modern middle class.

The fourth chapter, titled “The Dangers of Modernity,” is the most compelling chapter in the book. It illustrates how members of the modern middle class positioned themselves to be capable not just of remedying the “useless knowledge” of the past but also of diagnosing and treating the ill effects of modern life. Neurology and psychology were remedies for “moral decline, syphilis, alcoholism, and opium addiction,” which, in essence, were “unhealthy” responses to the pressures of a faster-paced life brought on by quicker, mechanized means of communication and transportation.

The fifth and sixth chapters highlight the active adoption (and adaptation) of European ideas about genetics and “will power” to the problem of improving the size and quality of Iran's population. In the case of genetics, Schayegh shows that Iranian experts drew on French neo-Lamarckian ideas (opposing the prevailing international scholarly consensus against Lamarckian thinking) because these ideas seemed to provide answers to Iran's problem of “inferior population growth.” The Iranian response to Lamarckian genetics was not uniquely Iranian; it was similar to the receptivity of these ideas in other “non-Western societies” (p. 112). Although the goal was to improve the collective Iranian nation relative to other modern nations, there was a perceived need to focus upon and to “treat”—through education—the individual. This dual emphasis upon the nation as a whole and its individual members had a practical consequence for Iranian champions of science and learning. As Schayegh notes in his conclusion, “[i]n Iran, at least up until the 1940s, modern sciences, whether natural or social, were almost entirely limited to education and other reformist applications.” This was at the expense of pure research and thus put Iranian professionals “at the periphery of . . . international networks of data accumulation and research” (197). It is worth noting that this essential dilemma has persisted in other technical and academic areas alongside new budgetary and political pressures that today's “modern middle class” has to navigate in Iran. In short, Schayegh's work helps us appreciate just how long this dynamic has been at work.

This sophisticated and thought-provoking work offers some “extras” for specialists. Some of the endnotes almost constitute short essays and provide a wealth of information about key individuals and processes. In addition, there is a fascinating appendix listing advertisements by doctors in Ettelaʿat (Iran's most widely circulated newspaper) from 1927 to 1939—a gift of relatively unfiltered qualitative and quantitative social data for researchers. Schayegh was clearly managing a tremendous wealth of information in the preparation of this book. His use of both extended explanatory endnotes and an appendix enhances the utility of the study without compromising his compelling and well-supported argument.