The disordered body: epidemic disease and cultural transformation

considerable time. The book is lucidly written, but is not easy to read, for the immense amount of information eventually numbs the mind. It is a pity, therefore, that the publishers have chosen inadequately to support the author's scholarship and the reader's participation. The book's structure is unhelpful, offering the reader little in the way of guidance, and little pause for evaluation and reflection. There are six chapters, of which three run to over a hundred pages, and one to an immense 169. These are, indeed, broken up into sections, but since these are not identified in the contents page, they are of little assistance in keeping hold of the thread of argument or permitting the reader a sense of direction. There is no bibliography-an increasingly commonplace and regrettable economy and the index is rudimentary, to the extent that it does not even contain an entry for the crucial concept "geoepidemiology".