Dope girls: the birth of the British drug underground

biological imagery, and three specifically medical; four on art and archaeology; two on cognitive science; and nine on applications, mainly related to computer imaging. The role of images in the history of the sciences has been shamefully neglected until recently (historians of medical science have been shining exceptions here, perhaps as a result of their training in a set of pervasively visual practices). It would be good to be able to report that this volume contributed to the belated recognition that texts are not the only sources that historians can draw on; but in fact most of the papers are purely scientific, and there are few on historical themes. The volume opens with brief but well-illustrated essays on the significance of the mappae mundi of the twelfth century and the great world atlases of the early modem period. The first of the biological papers describes the design of an exhibit at the science museum at La Villette, in which scientific images from the Revolutionary period are used to convey a historical sense of what "natural history" meant at that time. Otherwise there are few truly historical papers, though some of those on modem imaging techniques could provide suggestive material for a historical treatment of recent biomedical practice. Of the three papers on medical topics, the first, by Michel Lemire, is most likely to interest readers of this journal. It describes the astonishingly "realistic" coloured wax models of anatomical dissections, the making of which flourished briefly from the late eighteenth century into the early nineteenth. Those made by Felice Fontana at Florence from the 1 770s seem to have inspired patrons elsewhere in Europe. One important set was commissioned by the Duc d'Orleans from the surgeon Andre-Pierre Pinson; at the Revolution it passed to the new Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, where it was later supplemented by models ordered by Georges Cuvier to embellish his new gallery of comparative anatomy. Miraculously, many of these wax models have survived the vicissitudes of war and well-meaning modernization. It would have been good to have more illustrations of them; and their changing function, from being objects of contemplation (in a "cabinet of curiosities") to a new role as visual aids for teaching, deserved closer analysis.