The wages of sin: sex and disease, past and present

thereafter successfully fostered and the supply of specimens to London's colleges and schools for teaching purposes enormously expanded. Eventually that solution too became unsustainable. By the 1970s, national changes in education had again undermined the assumptions on which the garden was carried on, and it was faced with reinventing itself afresh. After several fruitless years of attempting to find an alternative funder, the decision was taken to turn the garden into an independent charity and seek a substantial endowment by means of a public appeal. The gamble fortunately came off, and in 1984 the Chelsea Physic Garden Company consequently came into being. At last opened to the public, it now receives up to 18,000 visitors yearly and has, inter alia, an active programme of research in molecular taxonomy and pharmaceutical bioprospecting. The previous histories of the garden had the Society of Apothecaries as their principal focus, depending heavily on that body's very extensive archive. In the meantime two very full histories of the Society itself have appeared, freeing the author of this latest volume, the garden's current Curator, to take much of the early part of the story as read and concentrate instead on bringing the account down to the present. The result is as informative as it is readable, even though the strictly chronological treatment makes it rather too like a diary towards the end. The tendency to excessive self-congratulation that blights all too many institutional histories when written by insiders has largely been avoided (though credit is given to the garden that rightly belongs to the firm of Loddiges as the first to popularize that far-reaching invention, the closely-glazed case), while a generous scatter of illustrations, many in colour, help to bring home to the reader better than any words the character of this eternally fragile enterprise and the context in which it operates. There is also a select bibliography and five appendices listing the names of the staff through the years, the more important maps of the garden, the medicinal plants growing in it in 1772 and 2000 respectively, and the species that line its present-day "historical walk". The wages of sin makes a passionate argument for humane and tolerant attitudes towards "diseases tied to sex" by revealing the horrors of the past, when sufferers largely received condemnation and punishment rather than care and compassion. In a very personal book, Peter Lewis Allen is intent on highlighting …