Book Notes

Josef N. Neumann and Udo Sträter, eds. Das Kind in Pietismus und Aufklärung. Proceedings of an International Symposium, 12-15 November 1997, in Halle, Germany. Hallesche Forschungen, no. 5. Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000. ix + 399 pp. Ill. €63.00 (paperbound, 3-484-84005-6, 3-931479-13-7).

This volume reproduces the contributions to a symposium held in the Francke Foundations at Halle in 1997 on the changing perceptions of the child and child education under religious auspices, from the early seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. The major sources are Protestant and central European, including the work of Comenius but also of the Jansenist bishop of Cambray, François Fenelon. The "psychology of learning" in a Christian and not only Pietist context is stressed throughout. Medical aspects are discussed by Josef Neumann, the senior editor and a historian of pediatrics, and Jürgen Helm, a specialist on the medical institutions of the Francke Foundations. Contributions and contributors are heterogeneous in background and specialization, and range from the child and its education in God in seventeenth-eighteenth-century literature to the developments preceding and including the work of J. J. Rousseau.

Renate Wilson

Johns Hopkins University

Daniel M. Albert. Dates in Ophthalmology: A Chronological Record of Progress in Ophthalmology over the Last Millennium. Landmarks in Medicine Series. Boca Raton, Fla.: Parthenon, 2002. 232 pp. Ill. $79.95 (1-84214-113-9).

This is now the ninth Dates in . . . that covers a medical specialty, part of a series of "Landmarks in Medicine." It is intended to highlight important discoveries and developments in the field of ophthalmology and vision, including portraits of many of the prominent and illustrations of some famous tools and techniques. It makes for interesting browsing. The compilation suffers from two defects: The first, admitted at the outset, is that it covers primarily Western medicine. The second problem, apparent only to the initiated, reflects the bias of the editor, who is a clinician and ophthalmic pathologist: both in the citations and in the portraits, pathology appears overemphasized at the expense of other subspecialties, and clinical advances at the expense of those in the basic sciences.

Arthur M. Silverstein

Johns Hopkins University (retired)

David T. Beito. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xiv + 320 pp. Ill. $59.95 (cloth, 0-8078-2531-X), $24.95 (paperbound, 0-8078-4841-7).

This study examines the health and social services provided by American fraternal societies during the first half of the twentieth century. Fraternal societies were, with churches, the largest voluntary associations in America, and were especially prevalent among blacks and immigrant groups from Europe, Asia, and Mexico. They dominated the field of health insurance and were major providers of life insurance. Many societies established capitation arrangements with individual physicians, termed "lodge practice," to provide medical care for their members when sick; lodge practice was successfully opposed by medical associations beginning in the 1920s. Some fraternal societies operated hospitals, tuberculosis sanitoriums, specialty clinics, orphanages, and/or homes for the elderly for their members, and several of these are examined in detail. The health activities of fraternal societies declined after mid-century with the reduction of immigration, the movement of blacks out of the rural south, and the adoption of government and employer-based health plans.

William G. Rothstein

University of Maryland, Baltimore County