Man and medicine: a history

methodology, and indeed a part of their radiance comes from Davidson's reinterpretation of Foucault's works of his "middle period", best contained in Les mots et les choses and L'Arche'ologie du savoir. Davidson shows the similarity and difference between Canguilhem's and Foucault's projects better than any other Anglophone commentator, and he relates all these theoretical insights back to the preceding analyses of sexology (which were themselves already theoretically nuanced). To paraphrase Canguilhem, theoretical programmes are many, concrete results few; Davidson's work cannot be criticized in this way. It is a substantial achievement in the application of philosophy to history of science and medicine, and is historical investigation of the first order. Because Davidson's work is so impressive, a number of specific issues are worthy of further examination. While the Foucaultian project, for example, is very much involved with erasing authorship and agency in preference for descriptions of the conditions necessary for the emergence ofsavoir, there are other, sociological approaches to the history of sexology which are possible, and which also address how the formation of concepts of sexuality, and especially of perversion, proceeded, but at a micro-social rather than an archaeological level. Ifhe had focused on the actors' strategies to adopt dispositions in the field of sexology in this way, Davidson's interpretation of Sigmund Freud's significance in reconceptualizing sexuality, for instance, might have been different. Foucault was interested in the development of discursive fields; some of this development can be thought of as social as well as "structural". Finally attention should be drawn to the appendix: 'Foucault, psychoanalysis, and pleasure'. These seven short pages are the most profound interpretation of Foucault that I have read. Not only do they perfecdly round-off the experience of reading Davidson's book, but they capture succinctly the challenge in writing histories of the present, as Foucault and his acolytes characterize themselves. It is only in the works of Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche that historicity has had such monumental resonance. Davidson has done historians of medicine great service by bringing his mind to bear on our territory.