Abū l-`Alā' Zuhr (m. 525/1130): Kitāb al-Muŷarrabāt (Libro de las experiencias médicas)

sets of Roman medical instruments for the range of medical and surgical operations which might have been carried out during the period of their use, and the extent of specialization by Roman practitioners. The second section, covering "women, children and sexuality", is less extensive and wide ranging. It includes papers by Danielle Gourevitch, who draws attention to the instructions provided by ancient medical writers for the moulding and fashioning of the newborn baby by the nurse as part of the, essentially cultural, process of producing a properly formed human infant; Ann Ellis Hanson, who examines Hippocratic metaphors for conception, abortion and gestation, clearly illustrating the cultural coherence of metaphors that mixed, congealed and baked the parents' seed in the oven of the womb; and Ernst Kunzl, who argues that archaeological finds of medical instruments in Roman imperial graves of women designated as medicae or iatrinai (generally but not unproblematically translated as female physicians) help to distinguish them from midwives and give them a more specific existence as surgeons, dentists and other specialists. A rather different dimension of ancient medicine is explored in the third section, which treats "religious and magic attitudes towards disease and healing" in both pagan and Christian contexts. All the contributors manage to keep the wider picture in view, however, and reflect, to a greater or lesser degree, the more complex, nuanced and integrated character of that picture, of relations between religion, magic and "rationality" within it, which has been emerging in more recent scholarship. Most noteworthy, perhaps, are Angelos Chaniotis' discussion of pagan propitiatory inscriptions of imperial Lydia and Phrygia which commemorate expiations made for sins (usually religious offences) which had resulted in divine punishment in the form of illness, and Richard Gordon's sophisticated scrutiny of the healing event in Graeco-Roman folk-medicine. The fourth section, on "medicine as a science and its relation to philosophy", is the second most substantial in these volumes, ranging from Plato to Alexander of Aphrodisias and Galen, and passing through Aristotle and his school, Herophilus and Erasistratus on the way. It also covers both of the main points at which ancient philosophy and medicine intersected-around the conception of the medical art and its relation to other types of art and learning, where Katerina Ierodiakonou's discussion of the views of Alexander of Aphrodisias on the subject is a welcome addition to existing scholarship, and around the zones of, methodological and substantive, doctrinal …