From the mind into the body: the cultural origins of psychosomatic symptoms

drowning drunks in the Dutch Republic during the eighteenth century is nicely complemented by Roy Porter's overview of the free market in medicine in Georgian England, in which elite physicians could not resist picking up their share of the profits of household pharmacy. Hilary Marland's discussion of the late entry of women into Dutch medicine highlights the almost total neglect of paediatrics in nineteenth-century medical education. Perhaps children were even further from the minds of most doctors than women. The histories of the financing of health care in twentieth-century Belgium and Holland emphasize relations between doctors and the state and occasionally slip into anti-medical polemic: Rita Schepers closes her paper by describing the Belgian Order of Physicians as the "jealous guardian of the not-always-ethical professional ethics". It is quite difficult for the British reader to follow the unfamiliar legislative, institutional and political developments in these texts. For example, the political right in the Netherlands are "Catholic and Protestant parties, better known as confessionals" (p. 176). This collection serves as an introduction to contemporary Dutch work on the history of medicine and all the papers are valuable in their own right. The reader's enjoyment is marred by the patchy quality of the English prose (see p. 201 for the worst example), some unfamiliar abbreviations and the absence of an index. This publication is directed toward the academic medical historian and unlikely to attract a wider readership.