Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis 1818–65

cities reveals a community of expectation, and her exploitation of jokes and epigrams can be taken even further to show the widespread penetration of medical ideas and medical theories. She looks at the evidence from the writings of famous patients, including Cicero, Seneca, and Aristides (where she underestimates Weinreich's contributions), as well as exemplary tales of great or infamous doctors. With her, we examine again gout, women's diseases and conditions, and the ethics of suicide, although her pull-out sheet of famous suicides reminds one of the lists compiled by the renaissance physician from Basle, Theodore Zwinger. Indeed, lists are what Mme Gourevitch excels in. She has a great range of information, which she sets down elegantly and lucidly, and there will be no one who will fail to profit from it. Yet in both books, the accumulation of fact tends to weigh down the argument, and to prevent any vigorous criticism of the sources, or of the methodology to be adopted in using such a great variety of primary texts. She is at times perhaps too eager to offer modern medical explanations and translations for the classical originals, e.g. Aristides is a sufferer from "phthisie", Seneca from asthma, but neither condition can be proved beyond doubt. The evidence of Galen, which is in general well exploited, is, however, often far more complex than Mme Gourevitch suspects, and is rarely a straightforward statement of fact. Galen's overt hostility to his fellow-doctors could lead him into the wildest of allegations, even to his own detriment, and a text like the 'Simulantenschrift' needs careful contextualization. The commentary on the Oath she refuses to ascribe to Galen, despite Strohmaier's arguments in favour of an author very well acquainted with the shrine of Asclepius at Pergamum. Above all, these two volumes are models of antiquarian scholarship, not history. The recent studies of G.E.R. Lloyd and Helen King on ancient gynaecology show how much more can be done to integrate medical ideas on women into a broader social and intellectual context, and the larger book never addresses itself to such major problems as what healers were available and how one came to be thought of as a medicus. The oft-told tale of Archagathus, the Greek surgeon first welcomed at Rome and then regarded with abomination, is here repeated in the context of the arrival of Greek medicine in Rome and of xenophobia, but the work of …