Medizin in Berlin

says of the reader, "I can expect him to provide his own framework". At the same time, Horace Davenport, Professor Emeritus of Physiology at Michigan, has an easy command of the material, and the reviews he presents of the publication of one or another faculty member are sometimes detailed and lucidly explained. Occasionally his accounts of medical life at Michigan, such as the fine description ofclinical diagnosis and the laboratory at the turn of the century, are quite full. All this should recommend the book as a reference work, but its usefulness is greatly diminished by the lack of a subject index. Those interested in a particular Michigan faculty member, or in surveying broadly a certain field within academic medicine, will find the volume informative, but even those committed to the history of twentieth-century American medicine are likely to want to read it only selectively. In the spate ofpublications that accompanied Berlin's 750th anniversary last year, Dr Winau's book could have been overlooked, but it deserves some attention as a general survey ofmedicine in Berlin from the time of the Great Elector onwards. The author quotes in his preface only two previous attempts to write a general history of Berlin medicine: Julius Pagel's 1897 publication, presented as a gift to the participants of the 15th German congress for internal medicine that year; and the first volume (1948) of Walter Artelt's never-completed Medizinische Wissenschaft und arztliche Praxis im alten Berlin, which went up to the end of the eighteenth century. While Pagel could still confidently state his intention to portray the medical developments in Berlin as "a faithful mirror of the continuously rising level of culture", the historical events and historiographical critiques of the century since then have made this position unattainable. The author acknowledges extensive reliance on the contributions of Heinz Goerke, Paul Diepgen and Manfred Sturzbecher, and assistance from Arleen Tuchman among others. This has resulted in a peculiar mixture of historiographical styles and foci. The clearest example is the shift from the more state-politically oriented chapters on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (in which Tuchman had a hand) to the more internalist account of the second half of the nineteenth century. Several historiographical revisions have been incorporated: institutional history, especially hospital history, figures large. Space is devoted to the 1848 "6reform" movement, in which the spotlight is rightly somewhat diverted away from Virchow to include people like …