Book Reviews

In addition there are three papers which are directly concerned with the history of medicine
in the period. Jole Shackelford gives a succinct but superb account of the fortunes of
Paracelsianism in Denmark as a result of the work of Petrus Severinus, Johannes Pratensis and
Tycho Brahe and their support by Frederick II. Harold J. Cook's paper succeeds in showing
the ways in which "changes in the political direction of a nation" might affect medicine, by
looking at the changes brought about in England after the Glorious Revolution. Apart from a
suggestion that the ontological theory of disease received a boost at this time, Cook
concentrates on the institutional changes in medicine wrought by the political scene. Finally,
Pamela H. Smith shows how Johann Joachim Becher tried to use his knowledge of medicine
and natural philosophy to give him authority to treat the "body politic" of Bavaria, where he
was court physician and mathematician to the Elector. Becher's task was to convince the prince
and his more conservative advisers that commerce was a natural and productive means of
producing wealth. He did so by drawing an analogy between the workings ofcommerce and the
cycle of nourishment and consumption in the human body.

Historical studies of the role of patronage in the history of science and medicine are in vogue
and the most significant of these studies show how the conceptual content of science and
medicine is directly affected by the nature of the patronage it receives. Not all of these studies
succeed in this regard but they all make important contributions to our understanding of the
historical background.

John Henry, Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh

DANIELLE GOUREVITCH (ed.), Maladie et maladies: histoire et conceptualisation.
Melanges en l'honneur de Mirko Grmek, Hautes Etudes Medievales et Modernes 70, Geneva,
Librairie Droz, 1992, pp. lxxii, 473.
The retirement of Mirko Grmek from his chair in the history of medicine at the Ecole

pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris has been marked by this collection of essays by his friends
and pupils. Croat by birth and French by naturalisation, he has always displayed a formidable
range of knowledge of all aspects of medical history to go with his equally wide linguistic
competence. From palaeopathology and the ancient Greeks to Claude Bernard and modern
AIDS, there is little on which he has not touched or on which he has not had something of value
and importance to contribute. Whether in personal communication, on international
committees (including five years on the Wellcome Trust's History of Medicine Panel), by his
endeavours to reach out as a medical historian to a wider public, or by his teaching in Paris and
at the International Summer School on Ischia, he has sought to inform and to bring together all
those whose interest and expertise might be profitably conjoined for the greater understanding
of medicine and its history.

It is fitting that the contributors have all considered one of Grmek's favourite themes,
disease, its incidence, characterisation, and history. They range from problems in
palaeopathology (including leprosy), through aspects of Egyptian, Islamic, and Tibetan
medicine, to concepts of disease and cure in Slav poetry and in modern molecular biology.
There are two essays on the French renaissance, and three on the eighteenth century, but the
bulk of the contributors deal with classical antiquity or the nineteenth century. Wounds,
intestinal incontinence, poisoning, the diseases of maritime communities, and the complex
story of how the "disease of Hercules" came to be identified as epilepsy are but some of the
classical themes; tuberculosis, meningitis, and yellow fever some of the later topics. All display,
directly or indirectly, the effects of their author's links with the honorand, and all show that
high standard of research and insight that we have come to associate with him.
Mirko Grmek is a prolific writer, as his bibliography reveals, and we hope that he will

continue to stimulate and inform for many years more. He has also been a tireless advocate, for
medical history and, not at least, for the inhabitants of his own Croatia in these dark times. His
friends have given him an appropriate tribute.

Vivian Nutton, Wellcome Institute

103

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