I awaken to glory: essays celebrating the sesquicentennial of the discovery of anesthesia by Horace Wells

handsome, lavishly illustrated, book promises answers to both qusestions. After moving to London at the age of nineteen, Sloane pursued early studies in chemistry and botany. Professionally inspired by Thomas Sydenham and philosophically influenced by John Ray, Robert Boyle and Joseph de Toumefort, Sloane took up medical practice as an ideal calling that allowed him to combine work and virtuosic diversion. Like many early collectors, his habit began on youthful botanizing trips; a voyage to Jamaica saw it flourish; and growing financial security in his middle years allowed him both to gather more and more objects, and also increasingly to buy up the fruits of other collectors' industry. By 1753, his holdings included some fifteen hundred shells, over twelve thousand vegetables, and no less than twenty-three thousand medals. As John Thackray points out in his chapter, what Sloane lacked in discrimination he more than made up for in comprehensiveness. Timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the opening of the British Museum, this volume is an assessment of Sloane's collecting activities presented in some sixteen curatorial divisions ranging from insects to ethnographic collections. Almost every chapter is crammed with fascinating details: for example, that unlike Linnaeus, Sloane arranged his botanical collections with more than one specimen per page, thereby reducing the possibility of rearranging pages for the sake of reclassification; that Sloane gathered his collection of Egyptian antiquities inspired by a profound hostility to what his contemporary John Woodward called a "barbarous and uncouth" culture; that a number of the 760 specimens in his humana collection were clearly prepared for didactic purposes; and, best of all, that the recipe for Cadbury's drinking chocolate was based on "Sir Hans Sloane's Milk Chocolate". Particularly successful chapters are Ian Jenkins' on Sloane's classical antiquities, John Thackray's description of his mineral and fossil collections, and Marjorie Caygill's analysis of the establishment of the British Museum. Jenkins sees Sloane amassing his collection of classical material culture in an attempt to explore the "microcosm". For Thackray, the mineral and fossil collections only make sense in the context of contemporary philosophical debates. And Caygill sensibly wams against the teleological temptation of crediting Sloane with an insight into what the British Museum would become, going on to advance a number of speculations about what really lay behind his "visionary" gesture. What distinguishes these contributions from the majority of others is the care that their authors take to assess the meaning of Sloane's efforts in the intellectual context of his own time. Much of the rest of the book unfortunately adds little to our understanding of either what Sloane was up to or indeed of its significance for us today, beyond a count of what of the original specimens survive. The reasons for this shortcoming are twofold. First, in dividing the book along modem-day curatorial lines many of Sloane's motivations and interests have inevitably been obscured; for the most extraordinary aspect of the story is precisely that all the material was gathered by one man motivated by what he saw as a unified rationale. Second, almost all the authors are themselves museum professionals, which has resulted in many of the essays being of more curatorial than historical value. Thus while Arthur MacGregor is to be heartily congratulated on producing a beautiful book, rich in painstakingly gathered and splendidly compiled facts about the breadth of Sloane's enterprise-many of them new-this book advances us little in assessing what it all actually meant.