Nommer la maladie. Recherches sur le lexique gréco-latin de la pathologie

The author's account of the gestation of this book will ring bells for many readers. Stimulated by an interest in speech disorder and the modem practice of speech therapy, he looked for theoretical beginnings in the seventeenth century. This led to his questioning the assumption that nothing "useful" existed before then. Once he found the early modem precursors themselves had a mass of precursors in the previous century, he wisely decided not to carry on running up a down escalator but to go straight to the classical sources instead-the Hippocratic Aphorisms 6.32, the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems 11.30 and a number of Galenic texts-and to research their ensuing transmission and receipt from there. Two classificatory systems for speech defects emerge: one according to the alteration of sounds conceived as elements of a grammatical system, and another conceived organically on the basis of injured constitutions. Similarly, Wollock identifies alternative methods of treatment, one social-psychological which concentrates on training and the treatment of symptoms (from which speech therapy grew), and another which was that of the physicians who used medicine instead because they saw speech defects as symptomatic of underlying diseases. Speech disorder is situated in the unstable no-man's-land between body and mind in the dualistic routines of modem medical thought. Its earlier conceptual history is therefore a territory which all serious practitioners as well as students of the organic origins of speech-especially "normal" speech-ought to explore. Our response to Wollock's painstaking mapping of it, a project which looks like half a lifetime's work, should be gratitude. The scholarship is worn lightly, and Wollock has an enviable ability to make the texts accessible, whether he is describing the grand scheme of humours and temperaments or the fine detail of interpretative problems over terminology. Theoretical problems arise. Some may argue that the frame of contemporary theoretical reference (limited to Chomsky and Cartesianism versus behaviourism) is too narrow. Wollock's concluding judgement-that the ancient tradition is "more appropriate to its object" than the Cartesian one-sounds like golden age utopianism as long as it is not connected to any further investigation of contemporary possibilities. Secondly, although the author gives every indication that he wants to avoid positivism or presentism, he does not really dig speech disorder in itself (as opposed to the various diagnostic approaches) out of the hole allotted to it by modern medicine. Partly this is an inevitable concomitant of choosing to organize material according to …