From Paralysis to Fatigue is an extensively researched jaunt through nearly two centuries of curious human affliction. Edward Shorter, a historian at The University of Toronto, has assembled a “believe it or not” array of clinical material and equally incredible companion theories and practices of the reigning medical orthodoxy. The title refers to a question familiar to psychiatry: Where have all the 19th-century hysterics gone? Shorter answers that symptoms, loosely termed psychosomatic because no organic pathology is obvious, have transmuted from primarily motor (paralysis, seizures) to primarily sensory (fatigue, pain). He argues that medical (or, more recently, media) impressions of what constitutes “legitimate” illness, in concert with cultural evolution, have effected this “shaping” of symptoms. Paralysis becomes a metaphor for 19th-century constrictions of social class, gender, and intrusive family authority, while exhaustion represents the untethered self-centeredness and anomie of contemporary life. Shorter's central thesis, which he reiterates throughout the book, is that, as the