Wiltshire Coroners' Bills 1752–1796

absence of any restraint upon the author's curiosity by the need to attend to a specific problem. This author is indeed inquisitive: he exploits analogies from all the natural world to explain physiological processes, and he is probably the first person known to have modified an existing object to make an apparatus for use in demonstration. Analogical reasoning and experiment loom large in these works, and Lonie's cautious formulations of the author's scientific method are wise and illuminating, particularly in their stress on the self-confirmatory function of a coherent description. There are also valuable appendices on the author's date, c. 410 B.C., and on vascular systems in the Hippocratic corpus and Aristotle. The book's long gestation has, however, introduced a tension between the old and the new Lonie on one important point, the links between the author, the so-called school of Cnidos, and earlier philosophical and medical thought. In place of the old dichotomy between Cos and Cnidos (cf. p. 311 on the weakness of arguments linking Egyptian and Cnidian medicine), the new Lonie gives us a much more fluid picture of interrelationships. There are many medical ideas in the air, and individual authors choose what best suits their purpose. Similarity of doctrine on one point need not indicate total agreement on all. This very complexity reveals the weakness of any theory simply opposing a specifically Coan to a specifically Cnidian medicine, and of asserting that this author had links with either school. Some traces of the old conventional belief still remain to contrast with the new demonstration of the richness of the bank of ideas open to the author and his audience. Anaxagoras and Democritus (on whom see H. De Ley, L'Antiquite' classique, 1981, pp. 192-197) are perhaps more significant than any mythical choregus of the Cnidians. I end with two criticisms and a word of praise. No Greek text is printed here: consequently, much space is wasted on the dutiful citation of the page and line in the editions of Joly and Littre, and, more seriously, the Greek lemmata correspond inconsistently to one or the other, and occasionally to Lonie's own working text, and much space is then needed to explain what reading has in fact been adopted. This passion for plenitude extends to the bibliography, where the first names of authors are given in full, even when they were never generally used by their possessors. Misprints are commendably few in this long book, and none is significant: that at p. xxvii, line 42, is especially piquant to the reviewer. Vivian Nutton Wellcome Institute