Gollaher paints a very dull picture of Dorothea Dix. There is not one colorful insight into this fascinating, world-changing woman. If there was even a hint of love or respect, or even curiosity about his subject, the author never reaveals it. There is an inexcusable failure on the author's part to make this famous lady 'touchable'. He discredits her faith with one stroke of his pen and rambles about the more cerebral parts of her life and work. Yes, she was interested in other things besides helping people but I don't care to know about how many bugs she collected and how many famous persons she socialized with. I want to know about Dorothea Dix! This was one of the most discursive, spiritless biographies I have read in many years. Read another biographer's account of this amazing woman, perhaps one that is written by a woman.

I bought this book after reading the following award citation it received from the Organization of American Historians: "VOICE FOR THE MAD provides more than a fine analysis of how and why a key northern antebellum reformer came to her reform, more than a well-written, sophisticated account of how a well-traveled reformer sought progress in Europe and the Americas, more than an illuminating account of how and why Americans created asylums for the insane. Gollaher's study also throws important light on how a woman outside the home could be an important lobbyist inside antebellum male legislatures; on how and why antebellum religion generated a white-hot reformist passion; on how and why reformist passion often stopped short, as in Dix's case, of anti-slavery; and perhaps most astonishingly, on how and why the Yankee woman as a reforming fanatic could succeed in Southern legislatures...[A] gem of a biography." Amazingly, the book is even better than this, because it reveals how a person was able to use her own demons -- her anger, her feelings of abandonment, her incredible nervous energy -- as sources of strength in the public arena of politics.

The title of this book: 'Voice for the Mad' does not accurately describe what Dorothea Dix has accomplished as part of her life's work.

Her achievement is in helping to provide shelter and care for those tragically afflicted by brain dysfunction. By helping to create hospitals with humane conditions, for people who are unable to achieve integration with society on their own terms, she has not provided the mad with a voice, but with the example of offering humane comfort in a time of great personal weakness.

Who is the Elie Wiesel of the Mad? Maybe, this is too much to ask of someone when their symptoms are acute, or too much to remember, when the symptoms are in remission. Perhaps, this book may never be written.

However, providing housing, food, medication and care for the time of affliction may be a step in the right direction. I have a feeling that an illness must be extraordinarily grave, in order to prompt today's society to provide the above.

David Gollaher's new book is an excellent summary of the relevant historical aspects of circumcision. In the process, he bares the surgery for what it is: a cultural mutilation with shifting and often dubious justifications. Gollaher amply demonstrates that what appear to be vastly different motivations (religion, money, obsessive hygiene) can come to the same conclusion and create strange bedfellows. For many Americans, this book will answer the key questions parents ask ("How did circumcision start?" "Why do we still do it?") and help put this very strange surgery in perspective. Non-Americans will simply continue to shake their heads at how the world's most technologically advanced country can superstitiously cut the genitals of most of its newborn boys. As circumcision recedes in the USA and once again becomes the domain of observant Jews and Moslems, another chapter will need to be added to this book.

While Gollaher correctly identifies the key issues, sometimes his accuracy lacks the rigor one would expect of an academic and health professional. For example, Gollaher explains in careful detail how a letter by British physician Douglas Gairdner published in the British Medical Journal influenced the British National Health Service to drop circumcision coverage. In fact, the NHS began in July 1948 with absolutely no coverage for infant circumcision, while Gairdner's letter did not appear until December 24, 1949, fully 17 months into the NHS.

The irony is that if this book is widely read, as it should be, it may serve to simply perpetuate much of this misinformation. However, most of the dozen or so inaccuracies I noticed are not serious and do not detract from Gollaher's central message that circumcision has a long and tortured history. This book should be required reading for all doctors and a critical part of informed consent for all expecting parents.

This is not an academic history text or a manual for parents who are trying to decide whether to circumcise their infant sons. But it will probably be of interest to both groups; after all, the list of books covering male circumcision is quite a short one, and Gollaher's book is a fascinating read.

David Gollaher provides a very readable cultural history of the practice of circumcision for the general public, explaining the orgins and prevalence of this custom in modern American medical practice. He succeeds in his goal of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. The strange is made familiar as Gollaher discusses the role that circumcision has played in a wide variety of cultures from aboriginal cultures to Judaism to Islam. And the familiar becomes more and more strange as Gollaher reviews the forces that caused circumcision to become adopted into the medical community in America. The more one reads about what the foreskin is and does, the odder it seems that this is such a routine procedure.

I'd recommend this to anyone interested in a fairly balanced historical account of circumcision and the forces that have made it such an entrenched practice in the West.

This book has so many interesting facets that it's hard to do it justice in a brief review. For my money, though, the chapter on how circumcision entered modern Anglo-American medicine -- how it was transformed from a Jewish ritual into a routine medical procedure deemed suitable for all boys -- is the highlight. By explaining the intellectual and cultural context of medicine in the 1870s, Gollaher explains why circumcision came to seem so reasonable (and so powerful). He clearly opposes routine circumcision, though not in a tendentious way. It's the cumulative weight of available evidence. I am the mother of two boys who were circumcised in the hospital. I had no real concept of what was done to them. The pediatrician didn't sell the procedure very hard, but he did say that most parents had it done and that he didn't see much harm in it. After reading "Circumcision," I wish my husband and I had given it more thought. We probably would have made a different decision.