On diseases in the Bible: a medical miscellany, 1672

argument and conclusion to frame his fundamentally nostalgic tone: a world lost to all but those who care to reify it. Unlike the scientist, the prose-poet carries the reader into his orbit of realism and nostalgia by creating a narrative world in which language, especially a limpid prose style, lies at the forefront of his imagination. The subject here-the primacy of food in the early modem world-cannot usurp style's prominent place. Camporesi has been writing a book a year for over a decade, all now translated into English by the Polity Press in England and dealing with quasi-medical topics, if medicine is construed in the post-modem habit as broadly implicating the body: the body in its sacred and profane states, cold and sick, fed and hungry, robust and emaciated (the corpo secco of the artists), gyrating and levitating, dreaming and hallucinating, beatified and apostatized, rotting and fermenting, palpitating before God and bleeding on the cross. These subjects remain his themes. Within these bodily transformations Camporesi's preoccupation remains primarily with food: bread, sugar, drink, meat, fish, soups; the basic perishables sustaining the lives of his pre-Bakhtinian sinners and saints and the protean fluids to which these foodstuffs are symbolically related: blood, water, urine; the detrius of other substances and their erotic and excremental connotations. These foods and fluids obviously had religious connotations in Christian countries. And to the degree that Camporesi connects food substances to symbolic actions and historical events he remains a modem Christian prose-poet (as well as social anthropologist of food) dealing with the most essential ingredients in the Catholic mixture that renders things Italian into forms they have come to represent in the post-Renaissance imagination. His new book, a study of hunger and plenty in the pre-1700 Mediterranean world, builds on The anatomy of the senses and includes topics he has so wistfully described before: feast and famine within the sciences of the belly, the myth of plenty leading to the banquets in Cockaigne, the haves and have-nots. He demonstrates what bread meant in that blemished world where poverty was the norm, not the deviation, and the degree to which malingerers connived for it. The difference in this book is that he also documents the plenitude. This feast may appear less then medico-historical but it is an illusion. Poverty and wealth, haves and have-nots, always alter food stuffs: collecting as well as imbibing them. Every medical historian knows …