"In this volume, scholars from a variety of disciplines in historical and cultural studies examine scientific, medical, popular, and literary texts, paying special attention to the different strategies employed in order to establish authority over the body through the management of a single part. By considering body parts that are usually ignored by scholars - the skin, the blood, the pelvis, the hair - the essays in this volume render the idea of a single coherent body untenable by demonstrating that the body is not a transhistorical entity, but rather deeply fragmented and fundamentally situated in a number of different contexts."--BOOK JACKET.