Book Notes
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPThis collection of translated and annotated primary sources is divided chronologically, with an introduction preceding each section. "L'antiquité classique" encompasses works by Hippocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Celsus, Rufus of Ephesus, and Galen, among others. "L'antiquité tardive" includes essays by Jean Chrysostome, Évagre le Pontique, Oribasius, and Alexander of Tralles. "De la médicine arabe à la clergie médiévale" comprises works by Constantine the African, Rhazes, Avicenna, Averroes, Hugues de Fouilloi, Hildegard of Bingen, William of Auvergne, and Bernard of Gordon. "Les renaissances" takes the reader from Petrarch to Ficin, Ofhuys, Melanchthon, Wier, and Huarte. Finally, "Du zénith baroque au crépuscule des Lumières" includes writings by Garzoni, Du Laurens, Guibelet, Robert Burton, Van Helmont, Sydenham, and Boissier de Sauvages. The book's concluding chapter is followed by a lexicon and an index.
These three volumes in the series History of Feminism provide an incredibly important set of materials on the nineteenth-century controversy in England over the use of live animals in scientific research. The editor is Susan Hamilton, assistant professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the editor of another important collection of Victorian writings called Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors: Victorian Writings by Women on Women (2004), and the author of Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism (2006).
The first volume is completely dedicated to Frances Power Cobbe's writings. Born in 1822, she was not only one of the best-known feminist thinkers of her day, but also the leader of the antivivisection movement. In 1875 she founded the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, one of the most important antivivisection organizations in England. The second volume presents other important antivivisection papers. The third volume is a collection of provivisection writings; particularly interesting are the pamphlets published by the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research founded in 1882.
The sources collected in these volumes include articles in the established press (periodicals as well as newspapers), daily news clippings, medical editorials, propagandist pamphlets, government documents, and educational material. As Hamilton suggests, this collection not only "encourages an awareness of the cultural work of gender in the vivisection controversy" (1: xiv), but also "shows the ways in which questions asked from the perspective of women's history can complement those posed by the history of medicine in its approach to the vivisection controversy" (1: xiv–xv). In fact, the discussion about the scientific use of live animals was a complicated mix of different voices: there were those who advocated the new attitudes toward "pets" and new ideas about pain; those who defended the scientific status of physiology; those who tried to introduce and explain the effect of a new medical technology, anesthesia; and those who redefined the concept of "scientific expertise." The bringing of all these papers together will help historians writing their own stories to appreciate the complexity of this rich controversy.
Histories of medical schools (usually celebratory) continue to appear in a regular fashion. While most are of interest primarily to those...
