Is the wholeness of "the body" revealed to be an illusion when its parts insist on their due? Has the term "the body" become meaningless because it is interpreted so differently across disciplines? In 13 essays contributors describe how the parts, both fore and aft, and the whole human or society relate to each other. They examine how the vascular system was linked with dangerous criminals, how medicine interpreted sodomy, why racial folklore became part of medicine, how ethnicity and gender became intertwined, how eros won over lacteros, or perhaps it did not, and why manual dexterity was important to both medicine and manufacturing in late eighteenth- century Britain. They explore how people define values in transsexual autobiography, in phalloplasty, in a culture of the male abdomen, in body building, in the aesthetics of the skin, and in the cosmetic surgery of 1926. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)