Garum and salsamenta: production and commerce in materia medica

said about the effect of the hostile environment on the maturation of the chemical philosophy in France. How far, for instance, did figures like de Claves deliberately play down their dogmatic attachment to Paracelsus's elemental theory for prudential reasons? There is more to be said also about the emergence of the new chemistry in eighteenth-century France. Chemistry and medicine were not so radically divorced in the period after 1750 as Debus seems to believe. The foundation of chairs of chemistry in a number of French universities in the decades before the Revolution reflected the belief that chemical analysis was the key to understanding health and disease. As a result, the discoveries of Lavoisier et al. were immediately recognized as of profound importance for the physiology of respiration. This is the first general study, taking in recent archaeological evidence as well as the ancient literary sources, of the uses, production and distribution of garum (a liquid fish essence), salsamenta (salted fish) and related products in the Roman world. After a brief introductory chapter, chapter II identifies the fermented fish products attested in the Roman world, and explains what they were like and how they were made with reference to modern parallels in the Far East. For me this is the most illuminating and fascinating chapter of the book. The ancient diet is a topic receiving increasing attention today, and Curtis shows that garum, in particular, needs serious consideration as a major source of protein for the urban poor. Chapter III on the medical uses of these fish products, which is presumably the reason for publication in this series, is inevitably short because they had no particular medical uses. A chapter on consumption and uses in general, which synthesized and elaborated Curtis's scattered comments on the dietary importance of these foodstuffs, would have been more enlightening. Chapters IV to VII, which constitute the bulk of the book, discuss the mainly archaeological evidence for the ancient production and distribution of these products. The geographical survey of the evidence is very thorough, and indeed over-thorough in that evidence for overseas distribution of fish products is usually treated twice with reference to both the exporting and importing areas. A thematic rather than geographical presentation of the data would have been more economical and clearer. Another related general problem is Curtis's positivistic attitude to the archaeological evidence; he tends to assume that production and distribution were …