Promoting experimental learning: experiment and the Royal Society 1660–1727

Assuredly, Hermione de Almeida dots the i's and crosses the t's more indefatigably than any previous scholar; but in doing so, she runs the risk of descending into self-parodic pedantry. Keats has only to mention an ailment or a herb to provoke learned disquisitions upon nosological or pharmaceutical beliefs found in writings with which Keats may have been familiar. Thus, on p. 77, the observation that in The eve of St Agnes, Porphyro "listened to [Madeline's] breathing" is the cue for a protracted discussion of respiration theory ("The close connection between life and respiration has been noticed by ordinary observers since antiquity. . ."). All too often it is obscure what purpose such amassing ofcontexts or influences is meant to serve. One could argue, for instance, that Keats's vision would have been inconceivable in any but in a medically trained author (a view hypothetically sustainable in the case of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, a generation later). But Hermione de Almeida does not define her contentions with any precision: indeed this book is conspicuous for its lack of a fully argued conclusion. And so many questions go unanswered: how much of Keats's outlook, one wonders, is attributable to his involvement, not with medicine per se, but with Burton's Anatomy of melancholy? What is here undertaken very copiously, however, is a delineation of the turn of the century background of "Romantic medicine" that pays paramount attention to Naturphilosophie and the new vitalistic metaphysics becoming powerful after John Hunter. Yet the aptness of this framework for explaining the case of Keats remains doubtful. Rather as might be predicted, much of the textual analysis of the interlinkage between Romantic medicine and literary expression concentrates not directly on Keats, but on Schiller and Humboldt, Coleridge and Green. And with regard to the depiction of Romantic medicine itself, it is a pity that Hermione de Almeida obviously completed the book too early to make use of Romanticism and the sciences (Cambridge University Press, 1990), edited by Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine; but her failure to draw upon Russell C. Maulitz's Morbid appearances: the anatomy of pathology in the early nineteenth century (Cambridge University Press, 1987) is rather mystifying. Finally, it needs to be said that this book does not meet the standards of accuracy one expects of the Oxford University Press. Peculiar lapses of language occur ("vertex" and "vortex" seem to be confused, for instance), and misprints are numerous, especially in the bibliography, where downright howlers appear. For example, the co-author with Daniel M. Fox of Photographing medicine: images and power in Britain and America since 1840 (1988) is twice given as a mysterious "Gilbert T. Gall" rather than, as it should be, Christopher Lawrence; and Owsei Temkin's 'The concept of infection' is said to have appeared in G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter's The ferment of knowledge-would that it had! This seems to be a volume that will be used more for its fund of information than for its interpretation.