Infinite tropics: an Alfred Russel Wallace anthology

John Goodsir, and developed an early love of the microscope and of botany. With an MD after his name, Sanderson did what any earnest, ambitious young doctor would do: he went to Paris. He studied organic chemistry and visited the hospitals. He sat at Claude Bernard's feet, experimented under his direction, and found him "the most profound scientific thinker, and the most remarkable experimental physiologist" (p. 26). Sanderson slowly shed his Evangelicism for the religion of science. In 1852 he moved to London. Here he married Ghetal Herschell who was to prove an exemplary Victorian wife, virtually living for her husband's work (they had no children). In 1855 Sanderson landed the post ofMedical Officer ofHealth for Paddington. After this he developed a friendship with John Simon, not a man lightly to tolerate fools or those with maggots in their heads. Under Simon's patronage, Sanderson received some plum commissions, notably the report on the cattle plague of 1865-66. In his spare time he did research, principally, says Romano, on "the mechanical and chemical processes of respiration" (p. 49). Sanderson was also developing at this time his obsession with experimental instruments (clearly he was not made in the Bernard mould). In the mid-1860s he discovered the newly invented sphygmograph and spent hours "sphygmographing" (p. 81). Always a man to advance on many fronts, Sanderson also worked on the nature of contagion, inflammation and on the Venus'sflytrap. In 1870 he was appointed professor of practical physiology and histology at University College London, and in 1882 he was elected first Waynflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford. Compared with the illustrious Cambridge school of physiology, the Oxford school (if such there was), Romano admits, was frankly a failure. Opposition from the antivivisectionists and lack of support for a sciencebased curriculum were the root faults. Maggots in the head surely had something to do with it though. Romano's argument in this book is both historical and historiographical and Sanderson is a good figure to help her make it. There has been a great deal of literature on experimental physiology in recent years, to the point that it raises the question of whether that literature misrepresents physiology as being seen by Victorian doctors as the premier science of medicine. Romano's argument, if Sanderson is anything to go by, is that it does. There was not one science for medicine, she argues, but many. Sanderson turned to comparative anatomy, pathology, chemistry, clinical observation and physics, just as much as he did to physiology, to solve medical problems. And that last point is where the maggots come in. In modern terms Sanderson was much more like a clinical scientist than a "pure" physiologist. He took difficult clinical problems and tried to solve them using a variety of methods including laboratory experiments. Foster's physiology was "easy", by comparison. There is a lot of research in this most welcome volume. Occasionally it is a bit idealistic. With a number of judgements I would not concur. Simon, for example, is said to have views of science based on "descriptive, cataloguing methods" (p. 161). But this is completely to ignore his commitment to transcendentalism. None the less, the book contributes to our growing sense of the hugely diverse texture ofthe meanings of science in Victorian Britain.