Galien. Tome II: Exhortation à l'étude de la médecine. Art médical

questions. He claims to offer more convincing explanations of extraordinary achievements than the usual fall-back option of attributing whatever it is that we may term "genius" to some mysterious, magical, undefined "special innate gift". Howe thus adds his contribution to the nature versus nurture debate. Can people be born geniuses? The simple answer, in Howe's account, is no. The whole work is dedicated to proving that sophisticated inborn capacities cannot exist, and concludes that the difference between creative problem-solvers and ordinary people lies far more in the degree of effort rather than in the presence or absence of any innate ability. Yet throughout the book, Howe is careful to point out that his approach to analysing genius does not seek to detract from the idea that geniuses are special. Howe is a Professor of Psychology at Exeter University. As a scientist, he is attracted by the desire to quantify and explain; he admits that he is daring to tread where others have deemed the terrain impossible. Defining the terms of reference, especially the term "genius" itself, in such a project is exceedingly difficult. Howe determines to consider in his study any individual whose claims to genius have received a substantial measure of support i.e. those about whom the term "genius" may be popularly used. In his analysis Howe advocates employing the disciplines of biography (using evidence of the genius's early advances and circumstances to reveal the origins of his or her genius), and psychology (which he defines as the ways in which people are affected by their biology and their influences). This psycho-biographical approach he admits is necessarily limiting. Detailed biographical information on a person's early childhood is distinctly scarce for many of the early historical geniuses. Thus he is compelled to confine himself to a survey of obvious characters principally from the nineteenth century (such as Charles Darwin and George Stephenson), and the twentieth century (for instance Albert Einstein). This book does not pretend to explicate how contemporaries may have employed the term genius to describe the prestigious people of their times. Hence, while undoubtedly of great value for a psychologist, the place of this book in the library of a medical historian is unclear. Howe's intention was not to write history; he looks back on the past two centuries with the values and knowledge of the late twentieth. Yet it does have uses for the historian: it is …