The concept of heart failure from Avicenna to Albertini

the society of his time. Very little attempt is made to place Newton within any context he would have recognized, or to understand the motives at work within the various practices on which he was engaged. The detail of evidence Westfall presents here does, ironically, provide a historian with almost enough ground to begin such analysis. Newton's notion of God's relation with nature and the work he conducted on the construction of a full cosmological account of that relation must be understood in terms of the legitimate practices which could reveal God's action in nature to each subject, and the ways in which these practices could then find a place in society. Hence the fact that the role of the natural philosopher was in the process of being defined takes its place as a crucial condition of the emergence of Newtonian natural philosophy. To exactly the extent that the historian of science assumes a particular characterization of the work of the scientist, an understanding of the construction of that work and that role will elude his or her analysis. Thus for Newton, his discovery that the cosmology of the apostate church was "a superstition of ye same kind wth ye Charmes & spells of ye old Heathen, & . . . may be truly called enchantment & sorcery" did play a central role in his work to establish a true philosophy of nature. Westfall often acknowledges that Newton "understood how radical his philosophy of nature was", and that he "took care to eliminate any hint of the radical theology that in his view had accompanied the philosophical tradition as one of the twin vehicles of truth". Yet he does not go further than this to penetrate the public face of this "heroic scientist". This biography, therefore, remains a brilliant, thorough, but ultimately unsatisfactory catalogue of Newton's activities, and not yet the historical analysis we need. Simon Schaffer St John's College, Cambridge