Book Notes

Helaine Selin, ed. Medicine across Cultures: History and Practice of Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Science across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science, vol. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003. xxiv + 416 pp. Ill. $163.00; €170.00; £109.00 (1-4020-1166-0).

The editor writes, "There are no universals regarding what it means to be well, or how to prevent, diagnose, or treat illness" (p. xix). Based on this idea, this collection of essays explores the ways in which different cultures deal with illness and ill people. The contributors and chapter titles are as follows: John M. Janzen and Edward C. Green, "Continuity, Change, and Challenge in African Medicine"; Ahmed Shafik and Waseem R. Elseesy, "Medicine in Ancient Egypt"; Cai Jingfeng and Zhen Yan, "Medicine in Ancient China"; Ananda S. Chopra, "A|yurveda"; Robert William Prasaad Steiner, "Cultural Perspectives on Traditional Tibetan Medicine"; Viggo Brun, "Traditional Thai Medicine"; Don Baker, "Oriental Medicine in Korea"; Margaret Lock, "Globalization and Cultures of Biomedicine: Japan and North America"; Dayalan Devanesen and Patrick Maher, "Traditional Aboriginal Health Practice in Australia"; Cluny Macpherson and La'avasa Macpherson, "When Healing Cultures Collide: A Case from the Pacific"; Lewis Mehl-Madrona, "Native American Medicine: Herbal Pharmacology, Therapies, and Elder Care"; Ruben G. Mendoza, "Lords of the Medicine Bag: Medical Science and Traditional Practice in Ancient Peru and South America"; Carlos Viesca, "Medicine in Ancient Mesoamerica"; Karen McCarthy Brown, "Healing Relationships in the African Caribbean"; Samuel Kottek, "Medicine in Ancient Hebrew and Jewish Cultures"; Guy Attewell, "Islamic Medicines: Perspectives on the Greek Legacy in the History of Islamic Medical Traditions in West Asia"; Hugh Shapiro, "Chinese and Western Medicine"; Jim B. Tucker, "Religion and Medicine"; Åke Hultkrantz, "The Relation between Medical States and Soul Beliefs among Tribal Peoples."

The Editors

Gerald J. Gruman. A History of Ideas about the Prolongation of Life. Classics in Longevity and Aging, in cooperation with the International Longevity Center. New York: Springer, 2003. xiv + 221 pp. Ill. $42.95 (U.S.), $47.80 (elsewhere) (paperbound, 0-8261-1875-5).

This was an important book when it was published in 1966 as a volume in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Today, with the growth of gerontology and geriatrics, and an increasingly elderly population, it has become even more germane.

Gruman's wide-ranging book and his search for ideas about the prolongation of life in the many cultures of the world have been standard references for nearly four decades. Our reviewer, the late M. D. Grmek, called this a notable and stimulating book: "The chapters concerning alchemists, hygienists, and philosophers (especially in connection with the concept of progress) are precious contributions to the history of medicine and gerontology but also to a better understanding of the development of general ideas about human abilities and limitations" (Bull. Hist. Med., 1968, 42: 475-76).

Gert H. Brieger

Lilian R. Furst. Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. xiv + 225 pp. $65.50 (cloth, 0-7914-5557-2), $21.95 (paperbound, 0-7914-5558-0).

In this, the fourth of her recent books relating medicine and literature, Lilian Furst discusses what are now called somatiform disorders as they exemplify the translation of distress to the body. In the historical sense, as she points out, most of nineteenth-century medicine was psychosomatic in nature. It is one of the charges against the medicine of our time that it has moved from a holistic to a purely somatic view of disease. And it is literature, she claims, that can help us to explain why patients speak through their bodies.

Furst provides an admirable discussion of that prevalent nineteenth-century diagnosis, brain fever, and reviews the medical literature as well as describing its role in novels such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), and Dickens's Great Expectations (1860). Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet...