A short history of cardiology

widely spread, notably in scholarly publications and in the advertising trades, than would seem likely for a "secret malady". Yet reference to it was far more heavily censured than in the rather sexually free-wheeling late seventeenth century, when the disease had wielded a powerful charge as political metaphor-the gaze on the diseased bodily constitution could subtly shift to meditation on the diseased political Constitution. This chronology seems more English than many of the contributors seem to spot: late-seventeenthcentury France was far more sexually buttoned up than England, and the metaphorical freight carried by the diseased body tended to be more in evidence-witness poor Marie-Antoinette! -on the eve of the French Revolution. Only two of the chapters in this second half of the volume are devoted to France, and though of high quality, they focus on somewhat unusual and unrepresentative literary figures, Retif de la Bretonne (Diane Fourny) and Sade (Julie Candler Hayes who offers an interesting study on pornography which transcends its bounds to develop into an analysis of how twentieth-century participants in pornography debates ignore the very different concepts of the body and its diseases available to Sade). The English contributions are more strictly confined to the mainstream: satire in the visual (Rose A Zimbardo and, on Hogarth, N F Lowe) and literary media (Leon Guilhamet and, on the novel, April London). In both countries late-eighteenth-century debate was highlighting the dangerous links of the disease to depopulation. Surprisingly perhaps, many of the cultural historians and critics of Part Two seem less secure about medical theories on the disease than the historians who dominate Part One-a fact which points to how much there is still to be done before this particular malady offers up all its secrets.