Syphilis in Shakespeare's England

of the popular press, and the laconic voice of Reitman. While the study is in many respects-thorough and detailed, it also leaves us with unanswered questions. The Chicago programme was part of a national initiative; yet, although we might be expected to know something of Parran's five-point plan, we are given no clear analysis of the relationship of the local programme to federal aims. The story of the Chicago programme begins at its launch; we are not told of its planning stages, nor of its initial specific goals-although these are referred to incidentally later in the book. A more coherent analysis of these goals and their context (including a more succinct history of the town's earlier anti-syphilis campaigns) would have clarified what was perhaps the most important tension within the story-that between the claims of the programme, and what it achieved in practice. It might also have clarified why Poirier chose to concentrate upon only selected facets of the programme: although the dragnet was evidently the centre-piece of Chicago's project, one would have liked to hear more about the relation of the testing initiative to treatment protocols and contact tracing-both of which were major points of Parran's plan. Poirier is clear about the difficulties inherent in trying to evaluate the success of such an enterprise; nevertheless she points largely to the failure of officials to grapple with unavoidable racial and sexual issues in their eagerness to espouse scientific objectivity. At several points in her analysis one suspects that she applies too easily to the past the mores, terminology, and attempted solutions of the 1990s. Again, she might have assessed Chicago's achievements more fully if she had briefly compared the strategies of other states, and if she had placed them within wider contemporary attitudes to race, syphilophobia, and prophylaxis. The final (perhaps unnecessary) chapter compares responses to syphilis with those to AIDS, and offers us, as it is bound to do, as many contrasts as similarities. We are left wondering whether constant responses to venereal disease are more or less powerful than the social and political changes that the last forty years have brought. A fuller contextualization of the Chicago strategy (and perhaps therefore a longer book!) would have been welcome. Nevertheless, this is a thoughtful, detailed, and immensely readable account of an important syphilis control programme, and of a refreshingly unorthodox doctor. Historians want, indeed they need, two kinds of …