Marcos Cueto and  Steven Palmer, Medicine and Public Health in Latin America: A History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. vii + 306, $29.99, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-107-63301-8.

about experiments on human blood transfusion in The Fair Maid of Perth (1828). In this timely essay on the fictional figure of the ‘revenant’, or the dead-alive, Inglis argues that the topic has a far wider reach than simply the medical: such advances in emergency medicine inspired larger existential questions about the increasingly blurry line between life and death. Scott is also the focus of Lindsay Levy’s chapter, which, however, focuses on the writer’s collection of medical texts – or, rather, the notable lack of medical self-help texts in Scott’s collection. Notably, David Shuttleton’s essay on medical biography as a literary genre – specifically, the hybrid and multi-authored biography of William Cullen – appears to reprise the organising principle of the first part of the volume because it concerns one of the founding figures of nerve theory, which G. S. Rousseau and many after him have linked most convincingly with the culture of sensibility. Cullen is thus mentioned frequently in the initial essays of Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, which makes the placement of Shuttleton’s essay somewhat curious initially. Yet, the publication date of the last volume of Cullen’s biography – 1859, even though the first volume was published in 1832 – suggests that chronology drove the placement of Shuttleton’s chapter in this volume, for which the range of years is 1726–1832. The figure of Cullen and the late time period also links Shuttleton’s chapter to the final one, written by Gavin Budge, who discusses the work of Cullen’s ‘wayward pupil Dr John Brown’ and the transatlantic reach of his ideas about Brunonianism and nervous exhaustion (15). Budge’s essay reaches late into the nineteenth century – and even across the ocean in its discussion of Harriet Martineau – and it therefore concludes the volume suitably by gesturing to the wide-reaching effects of Scottish medicine and its influence on literary culture. Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture is a valuable contribution to the field of literature and medicine. It argues convincingly that the Scottish Enlightenment was at the root of what we think of as interdisciplinarity today. However, this review would not be an honest one if I did not mention that the volume is plagued by several technical problems, which include: an incomplete index that does not account for all of the critical sources mentioned in the essays; punctuation errors and typos (eg. pages 14, 147, 149); erroneous spelling of proper names (eg. ‘Papavoine’ (179) versus ‘Papvoine’ (181, 182)); and the presentation of the name of James Tilly Matthews as ‘James Matthew Tilly’ (which is moreover spelled ‘Tilley’ on page 222). But these quibbles cannot overshadow the usefulness of a work that offers a range of highly original insights and lively, informative discussions about the ‘centrality of natural philosophy and medicine to the project of the Scottish Enlightenment’ (1), as Coyer and Shuttleton summarise the project. Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture is of great value for the field of literature and medicine and offers a necessary corrective to the past marginalisation of medicine and privileging of the ‘scientific and philosophic over the literary’ (3) by too many other histories of science.