Janet Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 544, £45.95/£24.95, hardback/paperback/ebook, ISBN: 978-0-231-16496-2 / 978-0-231-16497-9 / 978-0231-53832-9.

placing them in a hierarchy, and that they thought closely about the interaction between different non-naturals. The book makes important methodological contributions through its critical assessment of the wide range of sources which inform our understanding of early modern health, from regimens and childbearing manuals to personal correspondence and household objects. The diversity of the evidence enhances the interdisciplinarity of the volume. In terms of written sources, the authors urge us to pay closer attention to genre as we use medical texts. Maria Pia Donato explores genre with particular sensitivity, noting the importance of subgenres of regimen – like plague treatises and Lenten diet tracts – and tracing change over time with acuity. With regard to material culture, Marta Ajmar’s imaginative chapter on a hot drinking vessel argues that we shouldn’t merely seek to ‘read’ an object, but can try to ‘experience’ it as well. Experience is also an important theme for Frances Gage, who thinks about how paintings were used to evoke positive emotional responses in seventeenth-century Rome. Objects also played an active role because, when observed and experienced, they helped to share health-related values. The clarity and readability of this book are striking, and reflect superb editing. The precision with which contributions to historiographical debates are articulated is particularly helpful. The reader repeatedly encounters a vivid detail: a recipe for a paste to fill the joints of your bed to exterminate bedbugs; the early eighteenth-century concern that the new fashion for wigs impeded evacuation through the hair; or how Eleonora Boncompagni Borghese sent chocolate to her grieving daughter to console her for the loss of her son. The editors express a wish to stimulate ideas and ongoing discussion. They will succeed on both counts. The volume will inspire continued scrutiny of the relationship between the health of the individual and the health of the population and how it shifted over time. The comparative approach – achieved through a mixture of chapters about one or both countries, or places within them – will prompt future scholars to think comparatively, to interrogate the significance of locality in health practices, and to ask valuable questions about the intersections between climate, politics, religion and health.