Book Notes

Philip D. Curtin. Migration and Mortality in Africa and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002. x + 348 pp. Ill. $111.95 (0-86078-833-4).

"It is the perspective of world history that links human mortality with human migration in a theme that runs through many of the articles that follow," writes the author in his introduction (p. viii). The fourteen articles reprinted in the collection span the years 1950 to 1999 and are organized into four sections, as follows:

Caribbean History: "The Declaration of the Rights of Man in Saint-Domingue, 1788-1791"; "The British Sugar Duties and West Indian Prosperity."

African History: "Jihad in West Africa: Early Phases and Interrelations in Mauritania and Senegal"; "The Lure of Bambuk Gold"; "Africa in the Wider Monetary World, 1250-1850"; "Africa and Global Patterns of Migration."

Historical Epidemiology: "'The White Man's Grave': Image and Reality, 1780-1850"; "Epidemiology and the Slave Trade"; "Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa"; "African Health at Home and Abroad"; "The End of the 'White Man's Grave': Nineteenth-Century Mortality in West Africa"; "Disease Exchange across the Tropical Atlantic."

Environmental History: "The Environment beyond Europe and the European Theory of Empire"; "Location in History: Argentina and South Africa in the Nineteenth Century."

Waltraud Ernst, ed. Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000. Studies in the Social History of Medicine, no. 13. London: Routledge, 2002. xiii + 253 pp. Ill. $95.00 (0-415-23122-1).

Waltraud Ernst, in her introductory essay, "Plural Medicine, Tradition, and Modernity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives: Views from Below and from Above," sets out the intent of this collection: "The essays in this book assess the many interpretations and practical applications of any one medical system as well as the variety, or plurality, of medical approaches that co-exist or compete with each other at any one time and place. . . . Although the analysis of medicine(s) as systems of knowledge and discourses of power is not lost sight of, it is the pliability of a medical corpus and the virtuosity of its practitioners in adapting to changing social and cultural conditions, that are very much to the fore" (p. 9).

The remaining articles in the collection are: James Bradley, "Medicine on the Margins? Hydropathy and Orthodoxy in Britain, 1840-60"; David Arnold and Sumit Sarkar, "In Search of Rational Remedies: Homoeopathy in Nineteenth-Century Bengal"; Claudia Liebeskind, "Arguing Science: Unani tibb, Hakims and Biomedicine in India, 1900-50"; Walter Bruchhausen and Volker Roelcke, "Categorising 'African Medicine': The German Discourse of East African Healing Practices, 1885-1918"; Ria Reis, "Medical Pluralism and the Bounding of Traditional Healing in Swaziland"; Anne Digby and Helen Sweet, "Nurses as Culture Brokers in Twentieth-Century South Africa"; Volker Scheid, "Kexue and Guanxixue: Plurality, Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Chinese Medicine"; Patricia Laing, "Spirituality, Belief and Knowledge: Reflections on Constructions of Maori Healing"; Kate Reed, "Local-Global Spaces of Health: British South Asian Mothers and Medical Pluralism"; Maarten Bode, "Indian Indigenous Pharmaceuticals: Tradition, Modernity and Nature"; Michael Hardey, "Health for Sale: Quackery, Consumerism and the Internet"; and Ned Vankevich, "Limiting Pluralism: Medical Scientism, Quackery, and the Internet."

István Hargittai. Candid Science II: Conversations with Famous Biomedical Scientists. Edited by Magdolna Hargittai. London: Imperial College Press, 2002. x + 604 pp. Ill. $82.00, £56.00 (cloth, 1-86094-280-6); $38.00, £26.00 (paperbound, 1-86094-288-1).

"A selection of hors d'oeuvres to be enjoyed by a wide readership" is the description of this volume offered by Arthur Kornberg in the preface (p. vi). The profiles are in the form of questions and answers, the result of conversations between the author and the subject (and in two cases, between the subject and the author's wife, who is also a scientist). The author describes his method: "After the recording session, I prepare and slightly edit the transcripts and they are corrected and revised by the interviewee. The procedure is repeated until the...