Perho, Irmeli. Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts: Codices Persici, Codices Eyseriani, Codex Persicus Add. Copenhagen: NIAS Press and Det Kongelige Bibliotek, 2017. Hardback, pp. 706. ISBN: 978-87-7694-216-8.

Thomas Bartholin, The Anatomy House in Copenhagen, Niels W. Bruun (ed.) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015), pp. 222, $53.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-87-635-4259-3.

The period from about 1600 to 1680 was a golden age for Danish medicine and natural philosophy as cultivated by a small but powerful group of professors at the University of Copenhagen. A network of families known as the Fincke–Bartholin–Worm clan or dynasty had a dominating influence at the Faculty of Medicine and occupied nearly all the professorships during the seventeenth century. The most ...

Elizabeth Hallam, Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 444, $57.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-86189-375-8.

hospital she had booked into. She was shaved, enema-ed, and wheeled into the labour ward, a huge room with beds of screaming women, separated by curtains and with students checking them. After the birth she was wheeled into a corridor for a day or two until a bed in a ward became available. She only had contact with her baby at feeding times, she was in bed for nine days, home on the tenth, ‘wi...

Dominic Malcolm, Sport, Medicine and Health: The Medicalization of Sport? (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. x+212, £105, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-138-82645-8.

Sharon M. Leon, An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 240, $45.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-226-03898-8.

date by someone wishing to imitate Galen. But this is unlikely for several reasons. While such ‘reconstructions’ are known for literary themes, none involves such precise detail of past (or fictitious) events, and none of the pseudonymous medical material (excluding the Hippocratic letters) bears any resemblance to this type of pastiche. Arguments from verbal parallels with later Christian mate...

Critical Play: Radical Game Design by Mary Flanagan, MIT Press, 353 pp., ISBN 978-0-262-06268-8

THE PAST DECADE HAS SEEN A RAPID EXPANSION in the field of academic writing on the subject of computer and video games. The formerly marginalized field is now receiving its scholarly due as part of an increased focus on popular culture influenced by the development of Cultural Studies departments in universities. Early contributors to this scholarly field, such as Michel de Certeau and Dick Heb...

Olivia Weisser, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. ix, 281, $85.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0300200706.

technologies continue to affect our wellbeing, sharing a similar discourse to that articulated by George M. Beard – the proponent of neurasthenia – a century earlier. It would have been interesting to see a more developed analysis of this theme, since Exhaustion focuses entirely on human experiences. Looking at the exhaustion of the Earth’s resources might have provided an opportunity to explor...