Louis Pasteur

detail, a valuable contribution and a positive demonstration of his "philology and erudition". The images receive, by comparison, cursory treatment. It is only after repeated perusals that the reader grasps how simple the material really is, basically three male-female pairs dateable to 1539 and their derivatives: the De Negker-Vogtherr set from Strasbourg; the Sabio set from Venice; and the Goldenmundt set from Nuremberg (of which Carlino could not locate an impression). His chronological arrangement has merits, but one hankers for an amplified version of the old-fashioned classifications systems begun by Crummer and Wells. This could be done on three levels: the texts (which Carlino does to some extent), the image-type and its variations, and the original or recut state of the block. The sheer multiplicity of images that are almost but not quite similar, that may or may not retain random oddments of their original components, that have been disfigured by usage or crude colour additions, that often are accompanied by interchangeable blocks of anatomical detail which vary from printing to printing and texts that vary as well, can tempt an author to generalize from pure desperation. Carlino deserves enormous credit for having so boldly taken on this mass of material, and a book that opens up so many lines of enquiry for future researchers is a fine accomplishment in itself. 1998. Between these two dates, Gerald Geison's The private science of Louis Pasteur unsettled the genre of Pasteur studies with its account of Pasteur's laboratory work, clinical practice and scientific news management. Like Geison, Debre's account of Pasteur's medical work is influenced by Adrien Loir's A l'ombre de Pasteur and makes use of the newly available laboratory notebooks and unpublished correspondence. In the Preface to the English-language edition, Debre refers to "L'Affair Pasteur" that followed the publication of Geison's book and suggests that his volume will help answer many of the issues raised in the debate. Debre's biography is not hagiographic, but neither does it address the major points made by Geison. Also, readers will need to be careful as there are a number of errors that an author more familiar with the history of science and medicine would have avoided. The nature of Debre's contribution to "L'Affair" can be gauged from looking at two episodes central to Geison's work: the anthrax vaccinations at Pouilly-le-Fort and the first use of rabies vaccine. Geison made two claims about anthrax vaccination …