Maladies des femmes

The author has a good prospect of achieving his aim of reaching and informing the general reader. The book has less to offer the scholar, since it does not aspire to be a history of Roman medicine and bypasses questions that interest the professionals, beginning with the crucial preliminary problems of how Roman was Roman medicine, and where key figures like Galen and Soranus (both Greeks) belong in the tradition of medical writing and practice. In general, the author eschews in-depth discussion of the ancient medical literature, preferring the technique of illustrative quotation from the more accessible writers, and embellishing the text with a wide variety of items of general interest such as the diets of the rich, the setting of Pliny's villa, and the experiences of the hypochondriac Aelius Aristides at the Asklepieion of Pergamum. Where the author does possess formidable technical skills and knowledge is in the archaeology of medicine, and it is in this area that he makes his main contribution. The book is a mine of information, much of it fascinating, on surgical instruments, anatomical votive offerings, latrine deposits, and the layout of Asclepieia. The chief disappointment in this area is the lack of interest shown in recent developments in palaeopathology, in particular the detection of cumulative dietary deficiencies and episodic stress through the analysis of human skeletal remains. As social history, the book is usually reliable as well as readable, but the reader will find judgments that are less than sound or up-to-date about food supply systems in Rome and elsewhere (Rome was the only city in which a substantial portion of its plebs was given free grain over a period of centuries: cf. p. 39), the exposure of children and infanticide (it is unacceptable to label these practices "barbaric" without reference to the social and cultural context: cf. p. 106-7), or the demographic inferences to be drawn from funerary inscriptions (cf. p. 185). In general, however, the book is sucessful within its self-imposed, modest limits.