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Reviewed by:
  • Herman Boerhaave: The Man and His Work
  • Elizabeth A. Williams, Ph.D.
G. A. Lindeboom. Herman Boerhaave: The Man and His Work. 2nd ed., with an updated Bibliography and an Improved Edition of Lindeboom’s Bibliographia Boerhaaviana by M. J. Van Lieburg. Rotterdam, Erasmus Publishing, 2007. xxx, 372 pp. illus.

G. A. Lindeboom, who died in 1986, was a renowned exemplar of that increasingly rare breed, the practicing physician and humanist scholar. In the course of a fifty-year career, he worked as an internist-radiologist, professor of the medical faculty of the Free University (Amsterdam), and medical historian. According to the editor of this volume, M. J. Van Lieburg, Lindeboom produced “nearly 300 medical-historical writings, around fifty of which are monographs” (xviii). Of these works, Lindeboom’s biography of the famed early modern physician and chemist Herman Booerhaave has undoubtedly been the most widely known and influential. This new edition of the Boerhaave biography is intended as a monument to Lindeboom’s contributions to medicine in the capacities of clinician, professor, and historian. Lavishly produced, on high-quality glossy paper and embellished with a bookmark ribbon, it is a tribute both to the biographer and to Boerhaave, regarded by Lindeboom as the greatest Dutch physician and, so van Lieburg observes, “the ideal medical man” (xix).

This new edition of the Boerhaave biography reproduces Lindeboom’s original Preface and a Foreword prepared by the British historian E. Ashworth Underwood, who offered significant aid to Lindeboom in the work’s preparation. The new introduction by Van Lieburg offers biographical notes on Lindeboom, an assessment of his work as a medical historian, and remarks on the reception of the biography after its publication in 1968. Van Lieburg also comments on changes made to the first edition, which include minor corrections to the text and major corrections and additions to the references (endnotes), bibliography, and Lindeboom’s “Bibliographia Boerhaaviana.” The volume also includes, as appendix I, an English translation of the Commentariolus “compiled by William Burton from Boerhaave’s autobiographical notes” (while eliminating the Latin text included in the 1968 edition), and, as appendix II, “Genealogical tables of Herman Boerhaave and the brothers Kaau Boerhaave” (the latter the sons of Boerhaave’s sister Margariet). Fifteen plates and three indices, one of persons mentioned in the biography, and two detailing persons as well as publishers and printers included in the Bibliographia Boerhaaviana, complete the volume. [End Page 255]

It was doubtless a wise decision of those undertaking this project not to attempt an updating of Lindeboom’s scholarly account of Boerhaave. The changes that have marked medical history since the late 1960s have rendered the methods, interpretive concerns, and tone of Lindeboom’s biography in good part obsolete, and to remake this work that was very much a product of its time would have required the writing of a new biography. Using a conventional approach to medical or scientific biography, Lindeboom divided his study of Boerhaave into two parts. Part I detailed Boerhaave’s childhood, university studies, medical practice, work as first a “lector” and then professor of medicine at the University of Leiden, old age, final years, and professional and familial legacy; Part II offered an assessment of Boerhaave’s personality, his philosophical and medical views, and of the elements of his career detailed in Part I (Boerhaave as clinician, as family and consulting physician, as botanist, as chemist). The work concluded with Lindeboom’s judgment of Boerhaave’s role as “Communis Europae Praeceptor” (in the phrase of Albrecht von Haller). While Lindeboom’s research was meticulous in respect to Boerhaave’s life and activities, he made no effort to contextualize his subject’s medical and scientific contributions. By and large the work was focused on Boerhaave the man, whom Lindeboom admired for his prodigious capacity for work, deep religious faith, and “serene and Olympian” temper (161). Lindeboom offered many assessments of Boerhaave’s importance that rested on little beyond assertion: that his compiled lectures on nervous illnesses represented the first “complete treatise on neuropsychiatry” (134), that he enjoyed “overwhelming success as a practicing physician” (196), that he was the “first medical educator to give biochemical demonstrations” (222), and so...

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