The scientific revolution in Victorian medicine

agriculture" (pp. 193-267), "Medicine". including pharmacology (pp. 269-357), and "Sociology" (pp. 359-365). This volume is printed on good-quality paper, and is beautifully bound in glossy paper covers. One could easily appreciate the amount of work that was put into the preparation of the manuscripts of this volume, and in seeing them through the press. This review only covers the section that deals with medicine and pharmacology. Some papers are well documented with adequate references to sources; others-apart from the translated summaries of Arabic papers appearing in Volume I-are without any scholarly apparatus. Unfortunately, a paper on 'The title of a work of RazT with reference to "al-tin al-NishAbdri"', printed earlier (in F. but without any scholarly apparatus or even a warning that it was printed elsewhere. Such costly and unwarranted duplication should have been avoided by the editors of this volume. Interestingly enough, an earlier case of unwarranted reprinting of materiail also concerned one of Rhazes' books: 'Bur' al-saC a li-MuLhammad Ibn Zakariyya al-Razil', first printed in al-Machriq (1903). Printing errors, arising from inaccuracy and inconsistency of transliteration occur in some papers on medicine and pharmacology. The only way to minimize such errors (which are bound to occur, no matter how careful editors may be) is to supply each author with a set of galley-proofs, to be followed by the final page-proofs that should be also carefully revised by the editors. We offer our heartfelt congratulations to the editors of this volume on their achievements, and wish them every success in forthcoming publications. To judge by titles alone it might be thought that these two books would cover a great deal of common material. This however is far from the case, not least because A. J. Youngson's title The scientific revolution in Victorian medicine is frankly misleading. I approached the book expecting a study of microscopy, embryology, cellular pathology, instrumental diagnosis, experimental physiology, bacteriology, and so forth, and an account of how these disciplines entered the Victorian medical curriculum. No such comprehensive study exists. For the early century, and the case of chemistry, Morris Berman's Social change and scientific organisation begins to fill this gap. For the later period Gerald Geison's Michael Foster and the Cambridge school of physiology does much the same. Youngson however does not tackle this question at all, rather he recounts in traditional fashion the introduction of anaesthesia and antisepsis into surgery and midwifery. The great …