Stanis Perez, Histoire des médecins: Artisans et artistes de la santé de l'Antiquité à nos jours (Paris: Perrin, 2015), €24,50, pp. 469, paperback, ISBN: 978-2262039448.

Stanis Perez, Histoire des médecins: Artisans et artistes de la santé de l'Antiquitéà nos jours For a long time, medical history was written by physicians, many of whom cast their fellow practitioners in largely hagiographical terms. In the twentieth century, historians, sociologists and philosophers also began to study medicine's past and the result was an important historiographic turn towards more critical social and cultural histories of health and disease. These new studies drew on the experiences of the diverse range of actors involved in health care, including non-professionalised healers, patients and families. In this new context, many historians, especially in Francophone countries, were less interested in the figure of the physician as an historical object. In recent decades only one book has been published on this subject in French: Histoire du médecin, a collective volume edited in 1998 by Louis Callebat, and it rapidly became a book of reference. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, a new synthesis that includes recent research results is needed. The French historian Stanis Perez, well-known for his analysis of Louis XIV's health diary, takes up this challenge in his synthetic history of the physician figure from Antiquity to today. To define 'the physician' across the ages, Perez emphasises in his short introduction, is not a straightforward task. The figure itself is changeable, as are the conditions that allow an individual to self-define as a physician. To Perez, it is more practical and, importantly, more instructive to 'identify the social and cultural contexts in which the physician is embedded' (p. 12). Historical texts about physicians are typically normative or prescriptive, swinging between satire and panegyric. To overcome this obstacle and achieve a more nuanced synthesis, Perez chooses to play with the scales of time. Aware of the difficulties of this exercise, especially of the risk of giving readers an impression of only superficial glimpses, Perez affirms his choices. While he focuses mainly on French territory, he does not ignore European and Arabic contexts. He also favours private and primary medical care, avoiding hospital medicine, which has its own history. In order to develop a critical point of view, Perez utilises human and social sciences approaches to increase the number and intersections of both references and perspectives. Finally, for the historical figure of the physician he develops a 'biohistory' (p. 15), after Jacques Léonard and Michel Foucault, consisting of five chronological parts, from antiquity …