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Articulating Life's Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric about Abortion in the Nineteenth Century. By Nathan Stormer. (Lanham: Lexington, 2002. xvi, 235 pp. Cloth, $70.00, ISBN 07391-0429-2. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-73910430-6.)
There are numerous studies of abortion in nineteenth-century America. The works of James Mohr, Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Leslie Reagan, and Janet Brodie are well known; valuable but less recognized contributions have been made by Marvin Olasky and Frederick Dyer. Nathan Stormer has set out to expand on this substantial body of scholarship with an analysis of nineteenth-century medical rhetoric about abortion.
He makes clear at the start that this is not a study of how antiabortion physicians attempted to persuade others; rather, he seeks to work at a much deeper level, to see how bodies and cultural memory were constructed by...