The light microscope: its use and development

companion volumes could be prepared for other countries. Some of the sources available for France may not exist elsewhere, but it would be worth exploring the possibilities. For example, an analysis is included of 85 letters written by patients to a doctor over the period 1780 to 1830 (p. 19). An indication is given of the tone of the letters, of which parts of the body they mention, and of the kind of pain described. Comparable sources certainly exist in countries other than France. Of course, the precise figures are unimportant, but the overall patterns of such correspondence are highly significant. It is not surprising that "medicalization", in the sense of numbers of health professionals, is an important issue in the book, since the French sources lend themselves to explorations of this theme, and much work on it has been undertaken by French scholars. The huge amount of information on those who practised medicine in France is made possible by sources like the Cahiers de doleances, on the basis of which an indication of political attitudes is offered (pp. 30-1). Naturally, the limitations of such sources have to be recognized, but they are nonetheless valuable, especially when presented in the forms adopted here. An interpretation of the relations between medicine and revolution is given in the introduction (pp. 7-9). This is a useful statement, which presents the Revolution as a crystallization of trends already present in the ancien regime, trends that were moving towards reform. It is argued that the health of the citizen became of concern to the state, thereby providing a specific instance in which politics and medicine came together. Thus the question of the balance between continuity and change is dealt with in a helpful way. Much of the material presented in the Atlas bears somewhat loosely on the more direct interactions between medicine and the French Revolution. Taken as a whole the book provides both a sense of the larger context and an account of the links between politics and medicine-it is an extremely valuable addition to the secondary literature.