Dr John Rae

recognition is made also of Bright's discoveries in liver disease and neurology. But the reader gains little understanding of Bright's work in the context of changing ideas of disease, chemistry, and medical investigation of the first half of the nineteenth century. We do not learn enough about what, if any, skills and ideas Bright brought back from his European excursions. It is when discussing Bright the physician and scientist that the author avoids depth but yields to hyperbole: "No one since Harvey had effected so great a revolution in medical thinking", etc. (Perhaps the source material shaped the book's emphasis.) The reader encounters several failings of accuracy: Laennec is referred to as "the French chemist", and George Owen Rees is mistakenly said to have devoted "most of his working life to minute studies of renal tissue". Certain persons appear in the text or index missing their first name, e.g., "Dr Bostock", as if it were considered of no importance to look them up. Perhaps of greater annoyance to scholars, however, will be the casual approach to documentation. The collections of letters and papers used, some privately held, are briefly described in the back of the volume, but the author chose to avoid the appearance of scholarly baggage and kept her notes to a severe minimum. And even those that refer to letters usually omit dates or location of the items. This vagueness will prove frustrating to other historians interested in Bright and those who worked with him during the lively decades of British medicine not satisfyingly described by this affectionate and personal biography. Beyond the comprehension of persons who live in temperate climates, the unrelenting Arctic wilderness has frequently bound men to itself like an addictive drug, driving them to remarkable feats of fortitude and endurance. The bleakness and loneliness have driven people to near-madness, yet when they have abandoned it, they have felt themselves to be rootless and soulless. One such addict was John Rae (1813-93), an Orkney native who trained in medicine at Edinburgh and who sailed to Hudson's Bay in 1833 as a ship's surgeon. Finding the northern isolation to be congenial, he remained as a surgeon and a trader at Moose Factory, a remote Hudson's Bay Company fort. In 1846, he became an explorer, spending the next eight years in the Arctic. By his own account, in an autobiography preserved at the Scott Polar Institute in …