The French Paracelsians: the chemical challenge to medical and scientific tradition in early modern France

service of radical political aims. Advances in wealth and a consumerist attitude to life had created pathological lifestyles and addicted people to false medicine. Entrepreneurialism had rendered doctors complicit, finding their own gain in society's sickness. Only a few disenchanted radicals, like Beddoes, were prepared to step back and offer a scientific diagnosis, and they were not only marginalized by the conservative backlash, but fatally divided. Some saw the answer in returning knowledge, and hence power, to the people: a democratic medicine. But Beddoes, like others, had learnt to distrust the people: only the enlightened physician with an outlook formed by the natural sciences (in his case, chemistry) could be trusted to know what was best. Here Porter seems least happy with Beddoes' analysis-after all, like Beddoes, he is a committed and highly effective popularizer of his views on medicine. Porter points the paradox, yet because it seems to him perennial, fails to offer the reader the detail of Beddoes' own life and times that might explain his deepening distrust. Indeed, the book lacks the flavour of Georgian life usually so strong in Porter's books, despite, or perhaps because of, the lengthy quotations from Beddoes. Notwithstanding Porter's enthusiasm for Beddoes as a writer and "anthropologist" of his times, this reviewer found Beddoes less stimulating than Porter-even a Porter clearly striving not to outdo his subject in eloquence. A more clinical dissection of both the intellectual and social formation of his views, and how original they were, would deepen our appreciation of Beddoes as a doctor of his own society. Nevertheless, this book supplies an essential dimension to Porter's vision both of the period he has made his own and of his own work as a medical historian. This book is the first since Metzger's (1923) to give an account of the chemical philosophy in early modern France and, unlike its predecessor, it is richly contextual. Professor Debus not only provides a detailed analysis of the published work of French Paracelsians, but also carefully charts the manner in which the chemical philosophy was received and assimilated by the medical establishment. The fate of the chemical philosophy in Catholic France is clearly shown to have been very different from its progress in Protestant Germany and England. While the French court, especially in the reign of Henri IV, and the Montpellier medical faculty showed a certain sympathy for Paracelsian ideas, the pivotal Paris …