Malthus, medicine, and morality

together, the whole of this book is much greater than the sum of the eleven articles. This is not just because Hunter has slightly amended the original papers to add cross-references to the others, although this is undoubtedly useful, and off-sets the inevitable repetition resulting from their original composition as separate pieces. The book is greater than the sum of its parts becauseHunter sees it as a model for something much more ambitious than a study of one "great man" in the history of science. Hunter sees it as a model of how intellectual history should be written (p. 14). What this amounts to, and the origins of this idea can be traced back far earlier in Hunter's work, is a belief in the value of collective biographies, but now conceived on a grand scale. The approach Hunter has in mind is a long way from the collective biography of the fellows he saw himself as presenting in his early study of the Royal Society (The Royal Society and its fellows, 1660-1700, 1982, and 1994). Hunter is now calling for a collection made up of Boswellian biographies. "Primarily," he writes, "I see intellectual history as comprising the study of individual reactions to common problems: hence the best route to a proper understanding of intellectual change in any period seems to me to be an intensive scrutiny of the intellectual personality of each thinker, drawing on all available sources in an essentially biographical manner" (pp. 223-4). There is something essentially Baconian in Hunter's vision of intellectual history; perhaps the result of working so long on the supreme Baconian philosopher. "We cannot afford to pick and choose the aspects we study of a figure like Boyle", Hunter writes, "only by tracking him as a whole will we understand him" (p. 153). Reading this collection it is easy to be carried along by the author's mastery of his subject, in which different facets of Boyle are revealed in successive papers and continually reflect upon other facets revealed in other papers. The result is undoubtedly a brilliant and fascinating gem, but it is hard to believe that all other historical figures are susceptible to the same treatment, or that all intellectual historians are capable of pursuing it.