Galeni De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis Libri VI-IX

on the part of the ecclesiastics who ran the hospitals, and handicapped by erroneous views on the causation of the disease and its therapy. It was not plague, and therefore plague precautions, with their dire economic consequences, were not recommended; yet the fear that it might become plague always troubled them. Besides, the officials, often insulated from the lower classes, could not believe that such squalor and filth could exist in enlightened Tuscany, and their exposure to the truth, when it came, might lead them to recommend crash programmes of action but also laid them open to suspicions of exaggeration. Professor Cipolla has a great gift for vivid reconstruction of the events in archival documents. The reviewer will no longer be able to walk in Florence without imagining the odours of stewed silkworms and the putrefaction of the S. Maria Novella hospital, where patients died sharing a bed with three or four other sufferers. Vivian Nutton Wellcome Institute