This review focuses on two books by Shinya Tateiwa: Undesired Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Society (不如意の身体――病障害とある社会) and The Sick and Disabled, Postwar: A Brief History of Biopolitics（病者障害者の戦後――生政治史点描）. Together they attempt to answer the following questions: How are normative and descriptive research, or research activities and social practice related? and what kind of research is necessary and possible in the future? These tomes are voluminous, adding up to some 1,000 pages in all, including their bibliographies. Notably, they consistently emphasize the importance of descriptive research in the modern history of the body.
