The great pox: the French disease in Renaissance Europe

directory, and part methodological guide. As the author points out in the preface, there exist few general works on science historiography in any language, let alone Spanish. This volume fills that void, but it does so unevenly. Divided into sections on the study of science, theories of history and of history of science, scientific and medical historiography, current historiographic debates, the social history of scientific knowledge, and research methodology, the book offers a cornucopia of names, ideas, and places. We are reminded that understandings of science and of history are protean, hotly debated, and contextand actorspecific. The author discusses the triumph of interpretation over historical facts; the influence of the Vienna Circle, the Annales school, and Henry Sigerist; Robert Merton's insights on the popularity of hydraulics; the Karl PopperThomas Kuhn polemics; and Auguste Comte's three levels of development of human knowledge. Many others in this hit-parade of historians of science are mentioned only in passing (often in long lists of scholars), so that only the reader with prior knowledge of the work of Georges Canguilhem, for example, can appreciate the brief references to him. More troubling is the absence of scholars who have influenced the study of science from gender and race perspectives, such as Donna Haraway and Evelyn Fox Keller, particularly in a volume that promises attention to current debates. These imbalances limit the usefulness of this book as a graduate textbook of science historiography and give the reader the sensation of being caught in a battle between depth and inclusiveness. At its core, nonetheless, this remains a textbook, complete with dictionary definitions of science and elegant discussions about the object of the history of science including not just scientific events, but the entire set of circumstances in which they take place. Barona also draws on Helge Kragh's historiographic work to explain the anachronistic and relativistic dilemmas of studying scientists in their own epochs, thus "presupposing the existence of something called science" (p. 44). Such explanations are interspersed with selective information about sources, individual, scholars, research institutions and funding, some of which is long outdated. The book's last, shortest, and oddest chapter discusses research methodology, going from prosopography to experimental history of science to electronic search engines in just ten pages. Barona neatly resurrects scientific biography to its rightful post-hagiographic place, but he skips through other approaches such as discourse analysis. The overall sensation created is that semester's end is upon us, and we must hurry through the last topic. While this volume inspires new admiration for the task of synthesizing historiography, especially in a field that draws from so many perspectives, the book remains idiosyncratic. It also prompts the question of whether all the details that need to be leamed in a graduate history of science course-who's who, who's where, who says what, and how they do itbelong between the covers of a single volume.