Clifford W. Beers: advocate for the insane

here about scientific ideas or discoveries). Instead he tackles head-on in successive chapters the historiographical problems posed by Restoration science. What was its relationship to the natural philosophy of the Interregnum? What were the origins of the Royal Society? What was the importance of the Society during its first fifty years? How plausible is the Marxist-cum-Mertonian case that the development of capitalism and the accompanying needs of technology boosted interest in science and scientific advance? In its turn did science legitimize capitalism and an "opportunity society"? Did Puritanism, or Anglicanism, contribute to involvement in science? In its turn, how far was Restoration science used to buttress religion? Or was science a threat to faith (as also to humane letters and scholarly traditions of learning in the universities)? These and other questions are discussed by Dr. Hunter with scrupulously accurate attention to arguments on all sides of the scholarly divide (no straw men or women here), and with a wealth of illustrative material of his own, much culled from unpublished archives the testament to voracious reading and focused attention. If a middle course is steered on many of these issues, it is no wet compromise, but because the judicious Hunter (like the judicious Hooker) finds wisdom in many places, and constructs a golden mean of interpretation which surely does justice to the complexity of the age (the excellent critical bibliography raps some of the more one-sided versions of Restoration science over the knuckles). On issue after issue, Dr. Hunter is generous but balanced, praising, for example, the great merits of Charles Webster's account of Interregnum science while properly alerting the reader to his partisan reading of the "betrayal" after 1660. The medical historian might find here less of direct relevance to him than he expects. For Dr. Hunter has what seems a curious paradox to offer: that, though it was to a large degree in the bio-medical sciences that English science bloomed in midcentury, though the early members of the Royal Society included eminent biomedical men such as Thomas Willis, and though plenty of medical papers were printed in the Philosophical Transactions, in fact the London medical community related only rather fitfully to the Royal Society (Sydenham, for instance, did not join), and the Society did not contribute much to developments in medical science. Divided loyalties with the College of Physicians, and problems with professional identity may, suggests Dr. Hunter, have played their part in this. Dr. Hunter has written a well-researched, closely argued, economical and lively book, essential reading for scholars and students alike. It is a pity that this wellproduced volume (there are few misprints, except the now almost obligatory rendering of Charles Gillispie as Gillespie) of 230 pages should retail at the monstrous hardback price of I*8.50. Roy Porter Wellcome Institute