The women of Royaumont: a Scottish women's hospital on the western front

does neither. The twelve essays that make up the book range randomly over more than 2,500 years and are in no sense a comparative study. Each of the essays-whether on the healing power of medieval women, or the role of the blues in African-American women's literature, or on women doctors in Virginia Woolf's writing-is discrete and unrelated to every other essay. It is an example of a burgeoning genre of books that comprise independent articles on a very broad theme that are not peer-reviewed and are not closely directed or controlled by the editor. Although this practice has become a growth industry in Great Britain's medical-historical community, this volume is from an American press. Most of the contributors are specialists in literature-ancient, medieval, Spanish, English, American, German, African-American-and come at the subject through a handful of examples in their fields of interest. A number break new ground, notably the excellent survey of women doctors in the ancient world by the classicist Holt Parker and the description of the use of the blues in healing among AfricanAmerican women by the writer and poet Gunilla Kester. Some of the others add new insights and speculation about the complex interrelationships between women doctors and national environments in particular periods of history. Others report findings that have been explored elsewhere, such as Paulette Meyer's essay on women medical students in Zurich, and Regina Morantz-Sanchez's study of the controversial nineteenth-century gynaecologist Mary Dixon Jones. The collection raises hard questions about how to advance our understanding of women's past role in medicine and healing. What is the "healing" depicted in the book's title if it omits midwifery, nursing, and many types of domestic medicine? Surely the boundaries between medicine, midwifery, nursing, and other healing need to be defined if such terms are to have any meaning. The historical evidence for many of the literary insights in the book, moreover, is at best thin and sketchy; the analysis based on such evidence is of necessity highly theoretical and speculative; and many of the contributors seem to assume (falsely) that the principal purpose of tightened medical regulation in early modem Europe and later was to exclude women from practice. In the period since 1700, especially, where a great deal of archival and public records can be found, the time of scholars interested in women's role in the healing arts might better be spent in hard, empirical research rather than in excessive speculation over a few chosen literary texts. This book will be of marginal interest to most historians of medicine. Among literary scholars, however, and those interested in the intersection of medicine and literature, it may perhaps find a wider audience.