Ancient medicine in its socio-cultural context

as a living specimen of the eclectic but sensitive approach being promoted in the anthology. Eight sections entail: "the way we are, disease and mental illness, doctors and psychiatrists, nurses and patients, healing, last things, research, and ethics and purpose": not all medical categories in their own right and each with sub-sections. There is an advantage to the non-chronological arrangementGeorge Eliot followed by Robert Burton succeeded by a twentiethcentury doctor-which provides a good read (preferably while the reader is ill); and it is a good read more than anything else one craves in an anthology of this necessarily eclectic type. No one peruses an anthology as one does a novel, but rather dips into its parts and prays to become immersed by some essential aspect of illness and health, as I did in the Schubert letters, where the 30-yearold dying Schubert, never to be healed, pleads in his last letter for more novels of the American James Fenimore Cooper. To think that the sublime Schubert tried to distract himself in his final hours from bodily pain and the annihilation of self by Cooper novels in German translation! A wide choice of writers and painters is represented, along with many cartoons about sickness, and a particularly good selection of Rembrandt. Every reader will have, of course, their own list of desiderata and some will plead for restoration or substitution or addition, further proof of the living opulence of the topic. There is enough matter on, healing arts for a dozen anthologies. But I doubt anyone would claim that healing arts ought not to be anthologized in this way. This personal, eclectic approach is precisely the way to make a selection-put yourself, your entire life and set of beliefs on line, and let the reader judge-and begin a dialogue among diverse professionals that academics will eventually have to construe seriously.