445 Book Reviews

Book Reviews knowledge, legitimating professional practice, Jangfeldt has meticulously traced his life’s shoring up bourgeois values and cultivating an journey and professional career. The younger aesthetic sense of scientific work. Because son of an apothecary in Sweden, Munthe’s Bo¨melburg fails to recognize these alternatives brief medical education in Montpellier and and resistances, hers is an implausible story of Paris prepared him for work as an obstetrician, portrait photography’s role and significance in but he fashioned himself as a nerve doctor, psychiatric practice. claiming that he had trained under Jean-Martin Charcot at La Salpeˆtrie`re. His attempts to Eric J Engstrom, build a medical practice in Paris in the 1880s Humboldt University, Berlin failed, but he was assisted to set up practice at Piazza di Spagna in Rome and became a sought-after physician among English, Bengt Jangfeldt, Axel Munthe: the road to American and Scandinavian expatriates in the San Michele, translated by Harry Watson, 1890s. London and New York, I B Tauris, 2008, Munthe retired, a wealthy man, to the isle pp. ix, 383, illus., £25.00 (hardback 978-1- of Capri, where he would have his main 84511-720-7). residence for forty years. On Capri he had already built the Villa San Michele, presently Dr Axel Munthe (1857–1949) is best known a popular tourist attraction. In the private as the author of The story of San Michele realm, Munthe experienced two failed (London, John Murray, 1929), a book marriages. With his English second wife translated into some forty languages, which Hilda, ne´e Pennington Mellor, Munthe had has fascinated readers across the world. In a two sons. For thirty years he maintained a semi-fictional autobiography the elderly close relationship with Queen Victoria of Munthe presented himself as an old hermit, Sweden, a relationship lasting until her death retired from medical practice to a mystical in 1930. Munthe left Capri in 1943 and spent retreat on the isle of Capri. The adventures and the remaining years of his life in an apartment sentiments of the hero in The story of San at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. Jangfeldt’s Michele were a construction of an alternative main focus is on the Anglophile, cosmopolitan life, that of an ideal physician, ever available Munthe’s personal life and the social milieux to his patients, never charging for his services, in which he moved. Jangfeldt’s fascination modelling his life on St Francis, and a with Munthe’s ascent into high benevolent protector of animals. This book society—diplomatic circles, nobility, and the and probably also Munthe’s earlier Letters network of royal families in Europe a hundred from a mourning city (London, John Murray, years ago—and Munthe’s stance in the two 1887, 1899) about volunteer work during a world wars conveys empathy and thrill. cholera epidemic in Naples inspired many men Sweden does not have a great biographical and women to good deeds in medical service. tradition on a par with France or Britain. Munthe did not publish in medical journals. Jangfeldt’s work in this genre is therefore a His early fiction, however, provides some first. Lytton Strachey pointed out in his interesting glimpses into the practice of preface to Eminent Victorians that a medicine a century ago. biographer has two duties: to preserve, and to Bengt Jangfeldt’s biography Axel Munthe: lay bare, to expose. Jangfeldt excels in the first the road to San Michele is a valuable task, but he is not a critical historian who contribution to the publications in English cynically examines his findings to uncover a about the medical man Axel Munthe, who truth less seductive to a romantic imagination developed into a literary personality. Drawing than the first, fresh impressions. Nevertheless, on a treasure trove of Munthe’s preserved a reader interested to learn about the life of a private correspondence and other sources, high society physician a hundred years ago 445 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.229, on 01 Oct 2021 at 10:41:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300004129 Book Reviews will be well entertained by Jangfeldt’s amphetamine use in the United States, in part rendition of Axel Munthe’s story. to bolster his overall argument that American culture itself is addicted to the idea of “speed”. Ingar Palmlund, He articulates the different threads of The Wellcome Trust Centre for the amphetamine use, illustrating both a widespread appetite and diverse rationales for History of Medicine at UCL taking speed. But, considerable overlap exists across categories of users and interpreting the Nicolas Rasmussen, On speed: the many reasons why people take amphetamines lives of amphetamine, New York and London, becomes complicated. For example, while New York University Press, 2008, pp. ix, 352, Benzedrine was eventually marketed as a drug $29.95 (hardback 978-0-8147-7601-8). for mild or minor depression (anhedonia), its mood-elevating qualities soon attracted a Rasmussen’s book joins a host of recent different group of off-label users who sought it social histories of psycho-active substances in for its ability to produce “pep”. Similarly, the the twentieth century, emphasizing how drugs Benzedrine inhaler, offering an amphetamine- have shaped our modern medical and political based decongestant, became a “cash cow” for circumstances. This growing field of drug its producers, Smith Kline and French, not as biographies merges social and cultural history much for its legitimate uses but because with the history of sci-tech-med, and in that recreational consumers discovered that an vein Rasmussen offers a detailed description adulterated inhaler could provide hours of of the science behind amphetamine exhilaration. Allegedly this practice appealed production, but he also shows the impact of to famous beatniks, including Jack Kerouac amphetamines on US consumers. and Allen Ginsberg, which added considerable Drawing primarily on legal records dealing cultural appeal to this practice by associating it with pharmaceutical companies, medical with an elite social group. Recreational use publications and personal papers of such probably inflated sales figures and therefore personnel, and military sources, On speed distorts information about the marketed, explores America’s fascination with intended and actual uses. It also raises amphetamines. As the book title suggests, suspicions about the pharmaceutical “speed” has had many incarnations, from company’s knowledge of such drug abuses, military applications, such as increasing which proved quite lucrative to the industry. wakefulness and alertness on long flight Ultimately the numbers argument seems to missions, to treatments for depression-related fall apart due to these kinds of complexities, disorders, to mainstream diet pills, to an but Rasmussen’s general claim that by the end abused recreational substance, to pep tonics, to of the twentieth-century speed is intimately Attention Deficit Disorder medications, to woven into American culture is convincing. creativity enhancers. Considerable tension For a combination of reasons, the thirst for existed between the legally sanctioned uses more pep or increased levels of concentration and recreational abuses, but the drug and its and efficiency, combined with the growing advocates continually refashioned speed and tendency to medicalize behaviour means that found new ways to keep it in legal circulation. amphetamines in their various guises have Some of the repackaging came from become well entrenched in America. pharmaceutical companies competing for new Confronting this reality in a rather bold patent rights, but Rasmussen suggests that conclusion, Rasmussen turns to a critique of consumers also influenced the characterization the American health care system. He suggests of speed, especially with off-label use. that the combined forces of medical science, In addition to tracing the various patterns of pharmaceutical marketers and partisan consumption, Rasmussen attempts to quantify governments conspired to establish an 446 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.229, on 01 Oct 2021 at 10:41:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300004129.

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