Genèse de la psychiatrie. Les premiers écrits de Philippe Pinel

cannot tell, just by looking at it, what the status of the work is. Comparison with the Latin and with earlier translations reveals that it can lay claim only to being a "version", and a very idiosyncratic one at that. Certainly it makes reasonably smooth reading, but if we are interested in what Harvey said or meant, it will still be necessary to go back to the Latin; and going back to the Latin reveals that Dr Whitteridge's readings are sometimes questionable and occasionally downright wrong. The editorial apparatus makes matters no clearer. Harvey's text is pre-eminently technical, and it has a terminology to match. This applies to Harvey's own extensive Preface as much as it does to the body of the text itself. If we fail to understand the account Harvey offers of his enterprise in the Preface, because it is expressed in technical language, then we are unlikely to make much sense of the hundreds of pages which follow (except at the most superficial level as a series of experiments and observations). Yet the technicalities of the Preface are left completely unexplained. Instead of glossing the text, Dr Whitteridge has simply glossed over the difficulties it presents to the twentieth-century reader. At least in the 1653 English version the technical terms were rendered into an equally technical English! So the text has been briskly revamped, and the textual difficulties have been elided. An equally radical solution has been found for the problems presented by the very title of the book: Harvey's Exercitationes has simply and boldly been transformed into Disputations. If this is what Harvey meant to call the book, why did he not do so? The two words are different because they mean different things: they are not synonyms. It would seem that Dr Whitteridge undertook this project primarily because it is associated with that great name, Harvey. (Let us be honest, it would be hard to persuade a publisher to give this treatment to a seventeenth-century work on generation if it were by any other author.) But her working image of Harvey-as a modern scientist before his time-just is not broad or dispassionate enough for her to make much sense of this book, and it is remarkable that she nowhere offers any suggestion as to why anyone today should read it. Instead she apologises for it, as if it were the work of a great scientist …