Traité des maladies des enfants

says little that Eyler did not later include in his excellent intellectual biography of Farr, Victorian social medicine (1980). Several of the other essays also review ground substantially covered elsewhere in print. Each paper is accompanied by a discussion that the organizers of the conference self-consciously designed to further the exchange of professional perspectives by having an epidemiologist comment on each historian's paper and vice versa. This is an intriguing and promising strategy, yet the discussions stand more as unrelated, independent essays than as critical analyses of the main articles. Some of the discussions, notably Caroline Hannaway's perceptive analysis of the statistical approach to disease in France from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth century, are, nevertheless, among this book's most valuable contributions. Jean Astruc (1684-1766) epitomizes the medical professor of the French classical period. A native of Languedoc, graduate of the renowned medical school at Montpellier, professor at Toulouse and Montpellier, Astruc ascended to Paris in 1731 to become professor of medicine at the College Royal, and in 1743, he was received into the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Astruc was a prolific and extremely erudite writer, as well known for a pioneer contribution to biblical exegesis as for massive medical treatises on venereal diseases and diseases of women. Pedantic and polemical, Astruc did not hesitate to make theoretical pronouncements on subjects where he had slight practical experience nor to lend his argumentative skills to the cause of the Paris medical faculty when it sought to maintain the "subordination" of surgeons. The treatise on children's diseases provides a vivid, richly detailed picture of official paediatrics during an era immediately preceding medical reforms in this field and the well-known liberal views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The present manuscript of 1747, published for the first time in French, is one of several deriving from students' notes taken at Astruc's course at the College Royal. A pirated English edition was published in 1746. In the foreword, Astruc discusses delivery and care of the newborn, including traditional swaddling practices, the midwives' practice of moulding the head (of which he does not disapprove), precautions against the development of left-handedness, the choice of a wet-nurse, and weaning. Astruc urges respect for regional variations in these practices (ll faut se conformer 'a l'usage du pays). He then considers some twenty-eight diseases of children, Astruc's notions of disease reflect ancient humoral ideas overlain and interpenetrated by modern theories …