A comparison of selected poetic and scientific works of Albrecht von Haller

is discerned only in the tacit suggestion made by their juxtaposition in a single volume that single-culture studies have heuristic worth for historians studying other cultures. Some of these essays, such as Christopher Lawrence's study of the medical profession's posture toward sanitary reform in Victorian England and John Scarborough's survey of public health in ancient Rome, are solid contributions. Nevertheless, it is regrettable that the conference's discussion, the forum in which some substantive cross-cultural comparison probably emerged, was not summarized and published herein. As it stands, errors of typography and translation abound in this volume. Caroline Hannaway's essay, which assesses the animus of the growing concern in eighteenthcentury Europe about the health of populations, is clearly the best piece of the volume. Underlying her analysis of the shifting emphasis from private hygiene to public health is what perhaps is the most useful question to apply to public health history in any setting: Why did government care about public health, and how did this concern change over time? Replacing change over time with differences among diverse national contexts, this question could profitably have been used as an organizing theme for this symposium, giving it some measure of explicit analytical coherence. Also suggestive is Eiji Marui's intriguing paper 'Public Health and "Koshu-Eisei"', which teases apart the different meanings of Japanese terms for assorted Western concepts of public health and hygiene. His essay, albeit brief, displays the potential value for the comparative history of medicine of analysing closely both the explicit and connotative meaning of terms in different cultures. John Harley Warner Harvard University