Book Notes

David Hay. A Flickering Lamp: A History of the Sydenham Medical Club (1775-2000). Hampshire, U.K.: David Hay, 2001. xix + 252 pp. Ill. $30.00 (1-85065-491-3). (Available from Dr. David Hay, Stoke Hill Farm, Near Andover, Hampshire SP11 0LS, U.K.)

This appreciation of the Sydenham Medical Club "pays [its] respects to the doctors, a little over 300 in number, who have shaped its history" (p. xi). Founded as the Medical or Monday Club, it changed its name in 1912. The first three chapters set the scene: Chapter 1 is entitled "Physicians, Surgeons, and Apothecaries" (the club comprised all three professions); chapter 2, "Origins: The Records of the Monday Medical Club: A Possible Joint Parentage with the St. Alban's or Wednesday Club"; and chapter 3, "Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689): The 'English Hippocrates' after Whom the Monday Medical Club Is Now Called." Then follows the meat of the book: short biographical sketches of the club's members, presented chronologically. Several appendices include the club's rules, along with a listing of its presidents and secretaries.

Karen Reeds. A State of Health: New Jersey's Medical Heritage. Foreword by David L. Cowen. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. xxi + 143 pp. Ill. $45.00 (0-8135-2998-0).

This elegantly produced volume is the catalog of an exhibition first presented in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in May 1999. It is divided into four sections: epidemics, children's health and public health, healers and hospitals, and biomedical research. "Why New Jersey?" the author asks (p. xvi), and then answers the question sensibly and economically: "New Jersey can claim some major firsts and rue some lapses; but it is not markedly different from other states. . . . Local cases, though, bring home just how deeply daily lives and the larger movements of American medicine and history intersect" (p. xvi). As David Cowen writes in the preface, "This volume, although it is focused on New Jersey, is in reality a study of the history of medicine of the last four centuries, and especially the last two" (p. xiv). In addition to a wealth of photographs (many in color), the book also contains lists of Website resources and local historical societies and museums that emphasize the state's medical heritage. Ample notes and references conclude the volume.

Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. ix + 519 pp. Ill. $64.95 (cloth, 0-8223-2786-4), $21.95 (paperbound, 0-8223-2796-1).

These papers represent the proceedings of the Wenner-Gren international symposium that took place from 27 March to 4 April 1998 in Palma de Mallorca. New challenges and opportunities for kinship studies are posed by advances in reproductive technology, the Human Genome Project, and genetic screening programs (p. 1), and several of the contributions to this volume are especially germane to the history of medicine: "Kinship, Controversy, and the Sharing of Substance: The Race/Class Politics of Blood Transfusion," by Kath Weston; "Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic," by Charis Thompson; "Blood/Kinship, Governmentality, and Cultures of Order in Colonial Africa," by Melbourne Tapper (a discussion of sickle-cell anemia); "'We're Going to Tell These People Who They Really Are': Science and Relatedness," by Jonathan Marks (an exploration of the founding of the Human Genome Diversity Project); and "Genealogical Dis-Ease: Where Hereditary Abnormality, Biomedical Explanation, and Family Responsibility Meet," by Rayna Rapp, Deborah Heath, and Karen-Sue Taussig.