Sexual visions: images of gender in science and medicine between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries

English-language account of fossils (Parkinson was a reconciler of palaeontology with the Scriptures), and his Observations on the nature and cure ofgout (1805)-a work largely derived from personal experience-astutely treated the disease as a constitutional disorder due to excessive acidity. Morris's accounts of Parkinson's medical and scientific ideas are wellinformed, and avoid claiming too much for his subject's achievements. The true strength of this admirable biography, however, lies in its contextualization of Parkinson's medical practice within his wider outlooks and activities. As Dr Morris's researches reveal, in the 1790s in particular, Parkinson was a leading metropolitan political radical, a doughty member of the London Corresponding Society, a campaigner for universal suffrage and annual parliaments, and a valiant defence witness in some of the show trials of the decade. Surely as a consequence of these political sympathies, Parkinson devoted much of his life to conscientious performance of the office of parish doctor for Hoxton, and the great bulk of his medical writings comprise advice books directed at the laity (from the barely literate up to the middle classes), instructing them, in plain language and with graphic illustration, on health maintenance and simple medical self-care. Here Dr Morris might have drawn more attention to a certain ambiguity in Parkinson's stance. As a political reformer, Parkinson was undoubtedly a democrat and a man of the people. As a dispenser of medical advice, a strand of professional authoritarianism may, by contrast, be detected. For Parkinson deplored the excessive confidence in lay self-treatment that he believed William Buchan's Domestic medicine dangerously instilled; Parkinson wanted the common people to develop skills in symptom-identification, not so they could treat their own disorders, but primarily so that they might more speedily consult a practitioner. The one minor scandal that blotted Parkinson's career reveals the same cast of mind. In 1810, Mary Daintree took out a writ for wrongful confinement in a madhouse; Parkinson had been the certifying doctor. Parkinson successfully defended himself against the charge that he had taken her insanity solely on trust from her relatives, but, in defending himself in print, insisted rather vehemently that physicians must be accepted as the sole competent judges of mental health. The interplay of social radicalism and professional elitism found in Parkinson's writings would repay further study. This is a well-researched and rich-textured study of a neglected figure. Aside from a plethora of misprints (we find W. H. Bynum and W. B. Bynum but never W. F. Bynum), it is well-produced and nicely illustrated.