Medicine and the making of Roman women: gender, nature and authority from Celsus to Galen

of acupuncture was mediated. But despite being practised quite widely by moderate medical reformers and the odd medical luminary such as John Elliotson (1791-1868), Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Professor of Medicine at London University, 1828-77 saw a decline in academic interest. Bivins examines the records of isolated centres where interest and experiment persisted, particularly into sciatica, at UCH and the Leeds General Infirmary. In the process of transmission, the practice of acupuncture became severed from its native Chinese theories. But it is a testimony to the very patchy treatments of the history of Chinese medicine available in European languages that Bivins sometimes sets the fragmented European conception of "acupuncture" (surgery, venesection, pain relief) against the, now out-dated, image of an unchanging theoretically driven Chinese system of medicine "2000 years old" (an image challenged in Elisabeth Hsu (ed.), Innovation in Chinese medicine [Cambridge University Press, 2001]). The history of the third and on-going wave of interest in acupuncture, after the 1970s post-Cultural Revolution "opening up" of China, gets a brief mention in the conclusion and is a story that remains to be told in detail. Anyone embarking upon it will benefit from this well written, solid contribution to contemporary debate about innovation and the cultural specificity of medical knowledge.