A history of the university in Europe. Volume II: Universities in early modern Europe (1500–1800)

Lloyd asks who claimed to possess specialist knowledge of the body, and what it was used for. In both cultures the body was seen as a symbol of order. In Chinese medicine there was a greater interest in the social hierarchy of organs, but also the free flow of qi was seen as essential for health. Analogies between body and state were used to show that political health depended on the ruler's virtue flowing freely to his subjects through good advisers and ministers. A doctor should know about how order is best achieved in both body and state; to persuade a ruler that his suggestions were worth hearing, a doctor would be best advised to use idioms of rule in his references to the body. Greek medicine, Lloyd argues, was under real threat from those who saw it as having a success rate no higher than chance; Greek doctors' insistence that they knew the causes of disease was a strategy to save medicine. Dissection was used in China for forensic purposes; there was no point using it in the Greek way, to resolve anatomical disputes, since the body was seen in dynamic terms rather than as a set of stable structures. Dissection remained controversial in the Greco-Roman world, Lloyd argues, because it was incorporated into the cultural patterms of competitive display; Galen even records bets being taken on the outcome. The essays presented here show how far Lloyd has already achieved his stated goal of the "deparochialising of the history of ancient science". His forthcoming monograph Tao and Logos, being written with his collaborator Nathan Sivin, remains eagerly awaited. This is the second volume of a four-part history of the university in Europe which addresses itself to the "role and structures of the universities seen against a backdrop of changing conditions, ideas and values". The project is officially sponsored and the authors are well-known educational and intellectual historians. Striking the right balance is notoriously difficult in undertakings of this kind. In this case, comparison is invited with the stable of Cambridge Histories, especially perhaps with such volumes as the History ofRenaissance philosophy edited by Charles Schmitt. In the present reviewer's opinion, this book does not reach anything like the standard of the better Cambridge Histories, and is not remotely in the same league as the volume edited by Schmitt. Some of the difficulties of this book relate to problems of …