Aequanimitas, with other addresses to medical students, nurses, and practitioners of medicine

humanist science of man", and seventy pages to translations from Bastian's work-the bibliography of which ran to over sixteen printed pages ten years before he stopped writing. One does indeed come away from Koepping's presentation with a sense of what Bastian's anti-Darwinian "evolutionism" was about, as well as an appreciation of the varied influences mention only the more important). And if one brings to Koepping's book a prior familiarity with the thought of Franz Boas, its roots in Bastian's can be uncovered in the material Koepping presents-despite the fact that the evidence he himself uses to argue this connexion is rather unconvincing. Thus, while Koepping's book provides the basis for an appreciation of Bastian's thought and influence, it nonetheless has serious deficiencies as intellectual history. Given more space, these might be elaborated in some detail (for example, we are told on page 129 that Bastian "never used the word 'evolution'"; but on pages 164-169, under the subtitle 'Cultural Evolution', we are presented in translation a passage from his work in which the word appears no less than five times). To keep the issue at a more general level, however, one may say that there is a persistent problem of intellectual historical stance, which is reflected in Koepping's characteristic presentation of Bastian's thought and (even details of his biography) in the present tense-and in his translation of "Gesellschaftsgedanken" as "collective representations". Rather than to understand Bastian historically, Koepping's primary goal seems to be to convince us that Bastian is the unappreciated ancestor of a wide range of subsequent anthropological currents, beginning with the diffusionists who rejected him and continuing to Levi-Straussian structuralism. To put the matter in Bastianian terms: Koepping has been so intent on finding apparent similarities of anthropological Elementargedanken that he has given short shrift to the complex intellectual historical relationships and conceptual milieux of the anthropological Volkergedanken in which they have manifested themselves. Even so-and despite its splayfoot cardboard binding-the book may be regarded as a useful addition to the library of the history of anthropology. I first read Aequanimitas before starting my clinical training, having been given a copy by a medical uncle who presumably hoped that the high ideals of student life laid down in the addresses would inspire me. At the time, most of the book seemed tedious and pompous, much of it irrelevant, and some totally unreadable, so that I wondered what kind of …