Reviews and Short Notices

GeneralThe Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine. Edited by Mark Jackson. OxfordUniversity Press. 2011. xviii + 672pp. £95.00.

Mark Jackson has edited a book which will be valued by social historians, thoseengaged in medical humanities and general readers. It is clearly a new ‘handbook’ and assuch is not a replacement for Bynum and Porter’s Encyclopaedia of the History ofMedicine, but is rather an updated overview of medical history, written by some of thescholars responsible for pushing the disciplinary boundaries. It will have a shorter shelf-life than the Encyclopaedia, if only because it explicitly intends to offer suggestions forfuture scholarship – a surefire way to date the work, when it becomes clear whichsuggestions will be adopted, and which will languish. The book’s value lies in its scope,of both content and diversity of approach.

Topics in medical history are divided into three sections: chronological periods,geographically defined traditions and thematic approaches. The first of these sectionsis the simplest and the shortest, occupying a little over 100 pages and categorizingactivity into familiar periods of ancient, medieval, early modern and divisions ofmodern history. The second section is rather longer and is genuinely global, so readerscan profit from an editorial policy which does not put western medicine first and wherewestern European and North American medicine occupy less than 20 per cent of theavailable pages. I particularly appreciated the ability to read a concise survey of, forexample, medicine in South Asia alongside a comparable (if not explicitly comparative)treatment of Australia and New Zealand. Islamic medicine also supplies one chapter,although it is the only faith-based rather than geographically based approach in thissection.

Over half of the book is concerned with the third, thematic section, and while this seemsappropriate it does mean that western medicine predominates, since the research speci-alities of most contributors of these chapters focus on Britain, north-western Europe orAmerica. Themes run from life-cycle stages and death to a cluster of chapters on demog-raphy, public health and the state, before considering overarching issues including gender,sexuality and the law. This long section concludes with chapters that pick up hot contem-porary topics such as interspecies medicine, heterodoxy or holism, and emerging sources/products of medical-historical enquiry such as the use of oral interviews and film. Thesethemes provide fertile ground for anticipations of future scholarship. One highlight amongmany is the speculation at the end of a chapter on ‘Health, Work and Environment’ that wemight reasonably ‘look forward to a health history of places . . . and . . . an ecologicalhistory of the human body’.

A number of threads recur in the chapters in a way which suggests they were notartificially injected into the narrative but emerge in multiple independent ways. Theimpact of the AIDS virus is significant to essays aside from ‘Health and Sexuality’. Thecall for more edited texts is heard beyond ‘Medieval Medicine’. The combination of abroad approach and common coincidental themes is impressive and is a consequence ofthe many authors’ serious and comprehensive engagement with current issues. Some of

© 2013 The Authors.Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature © 2013 The Historical Association.

the chapters in all three sections provide excellent syntheses of recent work, whileevidently working within a tight word limit and not simply by following any formula.Ironically one drawback of the book, so far as I can see, derives from these indicationsof independence, in that authors’ different interpretations of their brief does give rise tosome unevenness; unsurprisingly, some chapters are better than others. As a reviewer Ishould of course reveal which ones I think are problematic; however, this would beinvidious in context, given the breadth of the enterprise represented by the Handbookand the brevity of a review. It would be unfair to single out a chapter for criticismwithout surveying the separate merits of all thirtyfour. Suffice it to say that somechapters are notably superficial, or overambitious giving rise to mere lists ofphenomena, while others assume too much knowledge on the part of the reader. Theother, minor, concern relates to the neglect of some areas which are coincidentallyavoided by all contributors. For instance, there is a very welcome subheading withinthe chapter on aging about menopause, but no concomitant one for menstruationanywhere else.

This book will be on my shelf from now onwards, and I’ll be referring to it often, forteaching, research and in recommending individual chapters to colleagues. Collectivelythe community of medical historians might just want to schedule another edition foraround 2027.Keele University ALANNAH TOMKINS

A New Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford,i: Medicine. By Emilie Savage-Smith. Oxford University Press. 2011. xxvi + 896pp.£150.00.

This monumental volume will certainly be a major reference work for a long time tocome, very likely as long as its predecessor, published in two parts in 1787 and 1836(indeed, it is unlikely ever to be replaced in codex form – any successor will surely be insome digital format as yet undreamt of). It covers 229 manuscripts, of which those withgood dating range from the seventh/thirteenth to the thirteenth/nineteenth centuries, andsome to the twentieth (CE). Over half of them are medieval, dating to before 1500 CE. Thevalue of this catalogue to Arabic scholars, and in particular those with a specialist interestin medicine, is obvious, but what may be less clear is its immense usefulness and interestto non-Arabists. It has long been recognized that the medicine of the Latin west from thetwelfth century onwards was hugely indebted to Arabic works (and not only as a conduitof the Greek tradition), but most scholars of Latin and western vernacular medicine havehitherto had only a very basic, and second-hand, idea of what those Arabic works consistedof. Now they will have access, via the impeccable scholarship for which Emilie Savage-Smith (professor emerita of the history of Islamic science at Oxford) is already wellknown, to detailed descriptions of one of the most important holdings of manuscripts, thatof the Bodleian Library.

The interest of these manuscripts for non-Arabists is by no means confined to sourcesof medieval European medicine, either: to mention just a few items with western con-nections, we find an Arabic text annotated in Latin in the crusader states, transcriptionsby Europeans made in both east and west, a translation of seventeenth-century Latinworks from Germany into Arabic, but written in Hebrew script. All manner of interac-tions are witnessed in the manuscripts catalogued here, finishing with a treat for con-noisseurs of bizarre medical beliefs, a twentieth-century Turkish miniature of toothworms(illustrated at plate XLV, for those who want to know what’s going on when toothacheassails them).

As if designed to cater to historians of western medicine, the catalogue begins withthe Galenic and Hippocratic translations to which they are likely to turn first. Theoverall organization is by topic (starting with translations), author (where known) andwork, making it easy to compare copies of a particular text, or texts on related subjects,

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© 2013 The Authors.Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature © 2013 The Historical Association.