Book Notes

Henry Power. Experimental Philosophy. Photographic reproduction. Oxford: Rimes House, 2009. 193 pp. £50 (ISBN: 978-1-874317-02-9).

Experimental Philosophy is the only publication of seventeenth-century physician and scientist Henry Power (1626–68). Originally printed in 1664, the book has not been widely available, with a modern reprint out of print. This photographic reproduction of Experimental Philosophy has been produced from a copy held by Dr. J. T. Hughes. Power’s book records his observations on experiments in microscopy, natural history, and anatomy.

Maimomides. On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs. A Parallel Arabic–English Edition. Edited, translated, and annotated by Gerrit Bos. With critical editions of medieval Hebrew translations by Gerrit Bos and medieval Latin translations by Michael R. McVaugh. Brigham Young University Middle Eastern Medical Texts Initiative, Medical Works of Moses Maimonides. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2009. 494 pp. $49.95, £34.50 (ISBN-13: 978-0-8425-2730-9).

This edition of On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs features the first critical edition of the Arabic manuscript. It is part of an ongoing project, begun in 1995 at the University College, London, to “critically edit Maimonides’ medical works that have not been edited at all or have been edited in unreliable editions” (p. xvi). In 1199, Al-Qāḍī al-Faḍil, counselor and secretary to Saladin, requested that Maimonides write this treatise “for fear that those who had been poisoned might die because they lacked information about easily available remedies that could be taken without the attendance of a physician” (p. xv).

Robert B. Baker and Laurence B. McCullough, eds. The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 904 pp. $250.00 (ISBN: 978-0-521-88879-0).

The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics offers “the first comprehensive scholarly account of the global history of medical ethics” (p. i). The book is organized in eight parts: “An Introduction to the History of Medical Ethics,” “A Chronology of Medical Ethics,” “Discourses of Medical Ethics through the Life Cycle,” “The Discourses of Religion on Medical Ethics,” “The Discourses of Philosophy on Medical Ethics,” “The Discourses of Practitioners on Medical Ethics,” The Discourses of Bioethics,” and “Discourses on Medical Ethics and Society.” Contributors include leading bioethicists and historians of medicine, and the subject is presented as accessible “not only to scholars but to the public, to students, to practicing health care professionals, and, of course, to bioethicists” (p. xv). The book also features a global chronology of persons and texts, short biographies of major figures in the field, and a comprehensive bibliography of the history of medical ethics.

The Editors.