The professor's daughter: an essay on female conduct

and do not do justice to the rest of this large, admirable book. Hufton's approach is panoramic and sweeping: a large brush applied to a Rubenesque canvas surveying many countries over many centuries. She locates women, particularly ordinary women, within the generations of poverty, plague, and epidemic. She views them vis-a-vis the entrapment of the female body ("the female body was colder [than the male's] and wetter and her sex organs were internal rather than external", p. 40) rather thn as self-reflecting subjective selves, let alone as cognizant patients being treated by particular doctors. To coin a Greek analogy, she surveys the Phoenician women rather than Antigone or Alcestis or Sappho. Her women are primarily peasants rather than aristocrats, and her view of medicine privileges the universal trend rather than the aberrant case or individual prognosis. Hufton demonstrates what the early modem female condition was: what it then felt like to be a woman (any woman) rather than the individualized female response. Her conceptual categories are health and the body rather than doctors and patients, or medicine as a field of knowledge, a laudable aim given her desire to chronicle the European global female predicament rather than comment on the local facts of women's medical history. But this emphasis should not indicate any slackness in her scholarship which does not refrain from telling us-for example-about Kaspar Hofman's commentaries on Galen's De usu partium corporis or Cesare Cremonini's discussion of Aristotle's theories of sex difference. If there is weakness in this approach it lies in the elucidation ofpatients who are not yet significant categories on this canvas because so little is known about their individual responses, or neglect of the new methodology of patientdoctor relations, overlooked because there is less extant narrative in the Renaissance than one would hope. A project like this documents again the need for a medical history of women despite the recent proliferating "histories".