“The Sometime Physician”, William John Little—Pioneer in Treatment of Cerebal Palsy and Orthopedic Surgery (1810–1894)

(including an introduction) with footnotes, in over four hundred pages. The limitations of this approach are obvious. Too many of the papers are too short, or superficial. Worse, there is far too much repetition. There are, for instance, several papers on Ossian, all of which recite the background to the "discovery" of the poems; and biographical repetition, notably with regard to James Beattie. A little editorial pruning in some places, and encouragement ofauthors to expand in others, could have made this work an important collection of scholarly essays and not simply the record of a conference. All that said, there is much in this volume to be welcomed, and the editors are to be congratulated in getting together a number of important papers on northeast Scottish affairs. The volume starts with a polemical piece by Donald Withrington, denouncing the Edinburgh-centred preoccupation of Scottish Enlightenment studies. The attack is well delivered, although presumably shortage of space precludes Withrington from developing in any great detail the reasons why other areas qualify for membership of the Enlightenment, rather than why scholars have usually behaved as if they should not. A revisionist position is also adopted by Anand Chitnis, this time in attacking the authors who identify the Union of 1707 as a fence dividing dark from light. Chitnis lays particular stress on the economic and cultural changes of the late seventeenth century as the precursors of eighteenth-century events. However, here again it would have been useful to have had the argument at more length, since in its present form it almost totally ignores the indisputable changes in patronage relations created by the Union. Almost every other essay in the volume is devoted to some much narrower topic. Alexander Gerard, George Campbell and James Beattie crop up frequently. There is an intriguing (but again too condensed) statistical study of the Aberdeen professiorate by Roger Emerson, and a nice account of the extramural science classes of Patrick Copland, by John S. Reid. There is also an excellent study of Macpherson (of Ossian fame) as an intriguer in Indian afairs, by George McElroy. There are a number of other finely-turned pieces, notably on painting and bibliography. Sadly, only in the back-cover blurb (not even in the index) is there a mention of John Gregory, cousin of Thomas Reid and probably Aberdeen's most famous physician before he moved to Edinburgh in 1764. to modern readers an appreciation …