Science and Medicine

Abstract In this year’s review, we provide an analysis of works that explore narrowly defined topics to extraordinary effect. The sections are divided both thematically and by authorship. In the first two sections, Leah Benedict highlights works that grapple with the transitory and the minuscule: the operations of gestation and fetal life, and the ubiquity and ephemerality of motion in Caroline Arni’s Of Human Born: Fetal Lives, 1800–1950 and Janina Wellmann’s Biological Motion: A History of Life, respectively. In the third and fourth sections, Anna K. Sagal reviews two works that position the study of water beside the science of ecology to explore the mutualistic exchanges occurring between those seemingly distinct fields, showing how Victorian narrative structures and techniques of signification informed the material studies of their era: Ursula Kluwick’s Haunting Ecologies: Victorian Conceptions of Water and John MacNeill Miller’s The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science.