Kalle Kananoja, Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. xii + 258, $99.99, hardback, ISBN: 9781108491259.

Abstract

research on paper as a materia medica, used for example to make plasters, is particularly interesting. Interactions between domestic and scholarly spheres are also considered in SimonWerrett’s essay on the reuse of eighteenth-century wastepaper, including for hairdressing techniques bound up with contested notions of femininity and masculinity. Moving into the modern period, Carla Bittel and Linker both explore how innovative paper tools facilitated bodily knowledge among medical practitioners and patients. Bittel argues that charts studying the human skull enabled phrenologists to construct authoritative, gender-specific identities and simultaneously allowed laypeople to subvert gender stereotypes. The ‘schematograph’ is Linker’s focus; she shows how tracing paper could protect women’s privacy during posture examinations, becoming an instrument of female power within science. Anna Maerker also demonstrates how the materiality of new medical technologies, specifically papier-mâché anatomical models, shaped and challenged gender perceptions. By portraying mechanistic rather than aesthetic bodies, the models both empowered and restricted their female makers and users across different imperial contexts. Another recurring, though more subtle, theme is the link between materiality and morality. Several essays refer to the appropriation of paper technologies by certain communities to claim moral superiority, and socio-political authority, over others. For example, Chapter Four sees Szalay argue that different male groups’ engagement with paper, through intellectual book knowledge, artisanal physical labour and commercial acumen, was central to their competing claims for masculine honour. Serrano’s outstanding contribution explores how a female philanthropic association, the Junta de Damas, asserted power over theMadrid FoundlingHospital through traditionally femininemanagement practices, rather than masculine commercialism. Von Oertzen similarly examines the permeability of the domesticbureaucratic boundary through paper. She explains how domestic data-processing supported nineteenth-century Prussian governance as housewives sorted, counted and organised census cards at home. By emphasising the value of household ‘orderliness’ to the state, this essay foregrounds the relationship between microand macro-level institutions which underpins several other chapters. In conclusion,Working with Papermakes an original and significant contribution to the histories of knowledge, work and gender through the lens of one extremely important material. It is itself a valuable epistemic paper tool for students and experts alike.