Accidents in History: Injuries, Fatalities and Social Relations.

Edited by Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin (Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi B. V., 1997. x plus 273pp.).

This is a pioneering work, based upon a conference designed to open up a field of inquiry not effectively cultivated before the 1990s. Naturally there is a lucid introductory essay by the editors that gives an overview, and nine individually-authored chapters follow. A helpful but slightly dated bibliography is included.

It is a comment on the lamentable state of the discipline of history that only on page 90 do empirical contributions begin that demonstrate some of the ways in which historians can approach, and in the past have approached, the subject of accidents. The first third of the book instead is taken up with discourse in which authors obsess ably about what an accident ideally is and how, philosophically, an accident should be considered and was considered in the past. In those essays and elsewhere in the book, it is true that a number of insights appear. When did accidents become part of the normal ecological systems of labor? How did accidents fit in with rationality and modernization? These are interesting questions, but they tend to be abstract so that the authors have to struggle - at great length - to modify tendencies to anachronism and irrelevance to the historical record.

In the European and Christian context, unanticipated events in a person's life started originally as signs and evidences of God's will. With the rise of statistical thinking, these unanticipated events acquired a markedly social dimension and were secularized into happenings that could to some extent be understood as, first, natural, and, second, statistically predictable in a population - but not necessarily for any individual person. In a third stage, the accident became normalized, as part of the expectable - if still not fully predictable - risk that one would run simply by living and working. And here of course philosophical discussion runs into the large current literature in the special field of risk, much of which is social and economic. Curiously enough, these authors are more interested in ethical issues that the subject of accidents brings up than in meditations on social and individual destiny that the idea of risk might have stimulated in the past.

The empirical contributions in this volume consist largely of descriptions of the ways in which modern Western societies have tried to respond to accidents. In Enlightenment times, Roy Porter points out, although a personal Providence was commonly accepted, people did try to prevent accidents - taking care, rationally - and devised such social institutions as insurance and hospitals to try to repair the damage. Roger Cooter and John F. Hutchinson explore how battlefield accidents (casualties) and the military response to them carried over into the civilian institutions of the nineteenth century, particularly the different patterns of first aid, ambulance service, and lifesaving. It was a time, as Cooter writes, when "accidents went public." (p. 108) Joel A. Tarr and Mark Tebeau in a wide-ranging essay, "Housewives as Home Safety Managers: The Changing Perception of the Home as a Place of Hazard and Risk, 1870-1940," trace not only the gendered bias of safety (the safety movement originated from industrial [chiefly male] accidents) but other social factors in early twentieth century attempts to deal with events that were not just natural but had human agency and therefore could be prevented - especially in the domestic haven that turned out to be dangerous.

All of the empirical contributors to this book reflect awareness of general societal determinants. Injuries from the operation of trains or factories were, of course, hard facts. In advanced and developing societies, confronting these events certainly prepared people to respond to the wounding of bodies that has accompanied - inevitably as some believe and others do not - the development of technology. The most important social trend that these essayists identify is the attempts of those in bureaucratic, organizational societies to devise bureaucratic and organized means to educate, to deliver first aid, to compensate victims. And Bill Luckin especially, focusing on auto fatalities in the wartime blackout, finds other garden-variety determinants of accidents such as social class.

By providing a label, categories, definitions, and examples and by posing many of the problems that come from thinking about accidents in the past, these essayists do what is expected to identify a field. Their efforts should prove extremely useful for any scholar whose work might include accidents and the social response to accidents. I am not sure that a large field will in fact materialize, however. Some years ago, I attempted to call colleagues' attention to the closely related subject of the history of natural disasters. Although there has been work on such subjects, no field as such has developed - largely, I think, because historians (as is noted in this book on accidents) hesitate to deal with events that are not within human control. And, in the second place, the subject of accidents may not be as fresh as the authors think. Dietrich Milles' essay in this book, on the borderland between industrial accidents and industrial diseases, brings out clearly that historians of medicine have already explored many of the most interesting issues in the question of the history of accidents. They have pointed out, for example, that modern Western societies give precedence to curing and compensating, not preventing, both illness and injury, a fact that appears prominently in the essays in Accidents in History.

Despite my doubts about the reactions of other historians, this is an original and important book. At the least, it will, more than most histories, make the reader think about large questions such as the meaning of fate - both personal and social - in history. The unforeseen has had devastating effects on ordinary people and whole societies (the toll of workplace and motor car fatalities has been enormous, just to name the obvious). Not only specialists in the history of technology, medicine, gender, and the inarticulate should know these essays - the social reactions to accidents, as the authors show, can illuminate all social history.

Ohio State University John C. Burnham