Eve's herbs: a history of contraception and abortion in the West

corticis, aliud medullT" becomes "one, of course, is that which forms the shell ('cortex'), the other the marrow ('medulla')" (p. 9). The names of other people and texts mentioned briefly by Wharton, and other details, are identified fully in endnotes. This is a careful and accessible edition. Wharton's book was of capital importance, building on some of the latest anatomical discoveries of his time. With great excitement, the structure of the nervous and lympathic systems were being revealed by English and Continental investigators; Wharton sought to bring an understanding of the anatomy and function of the glands into congruence with both these systems. The nerves as well as the lymphatics were thought to be vascular in nature. Wharton argued time and again that the glands served the purpose of both extracting needed fluids from the lymph and conveying them to the nerves and providing a means of evacuating waste products from the nervous system into the channels of the lymphatic system. By the end of the seventeenth century, as an appreciation of vascular physiology became commonplace, many authors cited Wharton's work with applause. He himself gave special thanks to the Dane Thomas Bartholin, the French Jean Pecquet, and the Dutch Johannes van Home. After defining glands in general, Wharton explained by reasoning and the presentation of anatomical details why the tongue, brain, and spleen were not glands; he then dealt thoroughly with the various glands themselves, including lengthy descriptions of the reproductive glands such as the testicles and ovaries. He gives an up-to-date explanation, for instance, of how glands produce the male sperm from a fluid of the nerves (echoing Hippocratic views), and the milk in the female breasts from a similar nervous fluid. Given Freer's fine translation, Wharton's views are easy to follow. Wharton's book gives clear evidence not only of an incisive author of much reading, but also of an energetic and careful anatomical (and vivisectional) investigator of human and animal bodies. While his book takes the form of a presentation of reasoned conclusions rather than detailed descriptions of anatomical experiments per se, he offers both sharp criticisms of others and statements of new findings based on close personal inspection. While Wharton is (like almost all his contemporaries) teleological and functionalistic in his reasoning, he carefully avoids the Galenic language of faculties and powers. Wharton did not yet have the ability to make use of the microscope in …