Xavier Bichat and the medical theory of the eighteenth century.

with fixed alkali" (p. 95). In this book the philosophical question of scientific creativity recurrently gets in the way of a very fine piece of historical work. Surely it is the historian's job not so much to judge what is a moment of insight but to show us how moments, ideas, thoughts, practices, are made historically into breakthroughs, insights, backslidings, etc. Or indeed, to regress further, to show us why we deal in a concept of scientific creativity at all. As long as historians continue to treat as unproblematical the sort of historically loaded terms in which philosophers trade, then the ghost of Voltaire will not be laid. History will still be philosophy teaching by example.