The nurse apprentice, 1860–1977

of letters, shown clearly by Laurence Brockliss and Eric Hamraoui. As well as corresponding widely with his contemporaries, Tissot has left us with abundant source material on the patient/ doctor relationship. His detailed diagnostic letters as well as the patients' requests allow historians, such as Frederic Sardet, Philip Rieder and Vincent Barras, to examine eighteenth-century conceptions of therapy, treatment and patient/doctor interactions. Though Tissot was renowned for his epistolary diagnoses, other essays in this collection show that he was well aware of the usefulness of physical examinations. In his overview of eighteenth-century anatomical pathology, Othmar Keel argues that, despite the continued dependence on Neo-Hippocratic and humoral theories, doctors such as Tissot began, when possible, to depend on examinations in their diagnosis. Tissot also kept up to date with new discoveries in physiology and pathology. His own treatise on nerves was an important contribution to a Europe-wide debate on the irritability of nerves, discussed here by Hubert Steinke and Urs Boschung. Tissot defended fellow physicians Albrecht von Haller and Johann Georg Zimmermann who posited that nerves could be irritated, even after death, questioning the animist theory that linked movement to the soul and siding firmly with the vitalists. Alain Cernuschi's analysis of acoustics and music in Tissot's Traite des nerfs provides an unusual take on this important text. This collection also contains a series of broader articles, meant to situate Tissot in his milieu. That by the late Roy Porter examines the conception of progress in British medical science; a subject that seems only tangentially linked to Tissot and has been poorly translated into French. More successful is Matthew Ramsey's essay on the tensions between a liberal English medical model that stressed the education of the patient and the paternalist German model that put all medical knowledge in the hands of trained and government approved specialists. In his work, Tissot adopted an amalgamation of both models. Articles on Swiss medical healers and the history of male obstetricians illustrate the world in which Tissot practised. This collection, strangely, does not address directly some of Tissot's most famous works. His Onanisme of 1760 is hardly mentioned, and his discussion of hygiene for the people mostly ignored. Since these works have been discussed elsewhere, the articles here focus primarily on his letters, less well known tracts, and personal relationships. Because these short articles come directly from conference presentations, some subjects are covered only cursorily while others are given repeated coverage. Overall, this collection provides some perceptive glimpses into Enlightenment medicine, but those unfamiliar with Tissot's legacy will need to turn to early biographies.