The Faber book of madness

supports her claim that it is impossible to "separate the biological from the social and political" in the history of Ecuador's Indians under colonial rule (p. 3.) Although the study focuses on a small area and there is little attempt to relate it to work elsewhere, this is a study that deserves to be read as a model of its kind and offers an inviting basis for comparative discussion within the New World and beyond. Despite some interesting and important individual contributions, the general standard of scholarship in The great maritime discoveries and world health, based on a conference held in Lisbon in 1990, is markedly inferior to that of the two previous works. The twenty-seven papers vary from wide-ranging studies of medicine in fifteenth-century Europe and inter-oceanic disease exchanges to more detailed accounts of specific diseases or the activities of individual medical practitioners and observers. One or two papers are of doubtful relevance to any theme the volume might lay claim to; others tediously cover the same ground as other contributions. The superficiality of many of the essays and the want of detailed, archive-based research of the kind Alchon's work keenly exemplifies-is the more to be regretted in that there is a great and urgent need for serious and in-depth research into the medical aspects of the "great maritime discoveries". The approach of the Portuguese participants in particular is more celebratory than cerebral: there is little serious discussion of the epidemiological effects of Iberian conquests and the slave trade (or awareness of recent English-language scholarship). But some interesting facts do emerge and a way is at least opened for the more scholarly exploitation of the evidently rich Portuguese source materials. But as a commentary on disease and discovery fit for 1992 this is a disappointingly complacent contribution. Roy Porter has collected here a wide-ranging anthology of writings dealing with madness in its various manifestations. Quite deliberately, he has chosen:to focus his attention on anything but the history of psychiatry-the profession, that is, and its particular and peculiar views of madness. He does, it is true, draw some of his extracts from texts written by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, but only when the focus of their attention is the existential condition of their patients, or the state of mind of the psychiatrist her-or himself. For the most part, however, Porter has concentrated on more personal, often autobiographical sources: the writings of …