Amy Koerber examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the earlytwentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of thisword on expert understandings of women's health.Shortly afterErnest Henry Starling coined the term “hormone” in 1905, hormones beganto provide a chemical explanation for bodily phenomena that werepreviously understood in terms of “wandering wombs,” humors, energies,and balance. In this study, Koerber posits that thediscovery of hormones was not so much a revolution as anexigency that required old ways of thinking to be twisted, reshaped, andtransformed to fit more scientific turn-of-the-century expectations ofmedical practices. She engages with texts from a wide array of medicaland social scientific subdisciplines; with material from medicalarchives, including patient charts, handwritten notes, and photographsfrom the Salpetriere Hospital, where Dr. Jean Charcot treated hundredsof hysteria patients in the late nineteenth century; and with currentrhetorical theoretical approaches to the study of health and medicine.In doing so, Koerber shows that the boundary between older,nonscientific ways of understanding women's bodies and newer, scientificunderstandings is much murkier than we might expect.Aclarifying examination of how the term “hormones” preserves key conceptsthat have framed our understanding of women's bodies from ancient timesto the present, this innovative book illuminates the ways in which thewords we use today to discuss female reproductive health aren't nearlyas scientifically accurate or socially progressive as believed. Scholarsof rhetoric, gender studies, and women's health will find Koerber'swork provocative and valuable.