The psychiatric society

order. As the book progresses, the ratio of Pinelian writing to Postelian commentary steadily increases, to the point where the final chapter consists largely of material from Pinel's Nosographie philosophique (1798) setting out a classification of neuroses which, according to Postel, is little more than a plagiarization of Cullen's work on the same subject. Here the book ends rather abruptly. There is no conclusion to tie together the threads of the various commentaries or to connect this derivative classification of 1798 with the truly original one Pinel advanced in 1801 in his Traite midico-philosophique. The Pinel we are left with is a figure of mediocre intellect, fortunate in having friends in high places after Thermidor and willing to advance his career by engaging in a certain amount of political opportunism. While this portrait may well be accurate, and (together with Othmar Keel's recent debunking of Pinel's originality in the conception of histopathology) may serve to counterbalance the heroic Pinel of medical myth, it nevertheless leaves obscure the nature and causes of Pinel's celebrity in his own day. What is called for now is a critical appraisal of Pinel's many accomplishments one that is animated not by hagiographic or iconoclastic urges but by an impulse for genuine historical understanding. W. R. Albury School of History and Philosophy of Science University of New South Wales