Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723)

economic answer to any of the French or English studies of death from the standpoint of social history. It is a study of infant mortality as an indicator of the patterns that can be perceived if the statistics generated during the late nineteenth century are examined in the light of their social grouping. Now Spree does this very well. He is interested in the individual as an economic entity and can, therefore, take the criteria provided by the Prussian census as reflecting real class (i.e. economic) differences. His conclusions are quite evident. The more money earned, the lower the infant mortality. What is most valuable about this exercise is that Spree adds a series of new axes to this otherwise terribly dull (and reductive) tale. He examines the shift from popular medicine to official medicine in Germany during the nineteenth century, and sees the economic problem of getting access to the latter in a time when health insurance was only beginning to cover the population. He sees the amount of money that municipalities were able to spend on health improvements such as water purification and drainage as a reflex of the wealth of the community. And most interestingly, he asks if the decline in infant mortality might not be keyed to the improvement (and decline in cost) of means of contraception. Was infant mortality a means of birth control? Thus what begins as a rather limited study develops into a rather different direction because of the German development of social history and its application to a problem in the history of medicine. Taking his lead from J. Kocka, Spree begins by using economic criteria to define his groups (economic criteria that are slightly suspect since they served the ideological bias of the Prussian census) and departs from these narrow criteria to examine the embeddedness of these groups in the fibre of economic and social history. What is disappointing about Spree's study is that he never really questions what the census was doing in creating the groups it generated. Also, Spree relies heavily on existing studies for answers to questions such as the professionalization of the medical profession. Some original work could have been done in examining the economic definition of the so-called "free" professions to see how they fitted into this pattern of economic groups. The other disappointment is that the book in no way lives up to its billing. …