Enlightenment science in the Romantic era: the chemistry of Berzelius and its cultural setting

humoral theory. Saul Jarcho, an industrious bibliophile, endeavours to show us the views of the physicians who favoured or opposed the bark by, in effect, setting up their books for us on a series of tables, arranged chronologically and geographically. He then guides us through his collection a book at a time, giving a thumbnail sketch of each author, sometimes making a few very general remarks about the period and place in which the book appeared, and then elucidating the passages on the bark contained in it. The library of information that he has gathered for us leads up to his piece de re'sistance, the works of Francesco Torti. On pages 120-4, he prints his own English translation of Torti's very rare Latin Synopsis of 1709 (the Latin text is printed in an appendix); he follows this by devoting a chapter to a detailed account of Torti's Therapeutice specialis of 1712 (another appendix discusses the various editions of this work), and then shows us some of Torti's contemporaries, and his reputation. In the first appendix, Jarcho discusses opinions on intermittent fevers held by well-known early modem physicians. Jarcho does not synthesize the information he has collected. The result is a kind of scientific report, mainly consisting of short paragraphs following one another without much in the way of transitions. He also demands a lot of his readers, pointing them to preceding or following chapters for bits of information, or asking them to draw their own conclusions about matters he brings up. For instance, after a description of the French antimony wars Jarcho invites the reader to compare and contrast "the factors that influenced the history of the Jesuits' bark" (pp. 77-8) and antimony, rather than doing so himself. He neither looks closely into the economic history of the bark, public opinion, or the history of the Jesuits, nor gives the reader much detail about the stories of the bark's use, such as the fascinating successes at the French court of Robert Talbor and Adriaan Helvetius. Nevertheless, Jarcho does make a few explicit and several implicit arguments: he manages to lay to rest the story about the bark being adopted because of the good effects it had on the Countess of Chinchon; he points time and again to the Jesuit connections of the early advocates of the bark; he suggests some of the possible ways in which the bark was marketed, …