Isabelle Boehm and Nathalie Rousseau (eds), L'expressivité du lexique médical en Grèce et à Rome. Hommages à Françoise Skoda (Paris: Presse de l'université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014), pp. 512, €37.00, paperback, ISBN 978-2-84050-929-5.

originally made a Danish translation in 2007 but sensibly decided that to reach outside the Scandinavian countries an English translation was needed. The translation into English was made by Peter Fisher, and, in addition to Bartholin’s main text, the book also includes a substantial introduction written by Morten Fink-Jensen in which he places the book in a broader historical context. As Fink-Jensen points out, this context was not only medical and scholarly but also included a strong religious element. For Bartholin and his contemporaries in Lutheran Denmark, anatomy was a way to get insight into the amazing power and wisdom of the almighty God. Apart from Fink-Jensen’s introduction and Bruun’s detailed description of and comments to Bartholin’s text, The Anatomy House includes brief documents relating to the state of the building as of 1676, at a time when it was slowly decaying. However, it is Bartholin’s text of 1662 which is the central part of the book and what makes it valuable to historians of science and medicine. This text includes not only Bartholin’s description of the anatomical theatre but also three lengthy prospectuses written by Paulli. The material is arranged throughout in the established scholarly fashion with the original Latin text facing the English translation. Apart from describing some of the dissections taking place in the anatomy house, Bartholin’s little book includes catalogues of two museums or cabinets, one belonging to himself and the other to the University of Copenhagen, which received it as a gift from Bartholin’s deceased cousin, the physician Henrik Fuiren. Next to the auditorium building, Bartholin had his own house, and there, he informs the reader, ‘various items that attract the curiosity of foreign visitors may be viewed’. A long list of the museum’s natural objects follows, some of them curious indeed. They include ‘the skeleton of a large dog in which the lymphatic vessels were first discovered in Copenhagen’, ‘the horn from a Greenland unicorn’ and ‘the hand and rib of a mermaid’. The collections of Bartholin and Fuiren were interesting but unimpressive compared to the much larger museum established by Bartholin’s uncle Ole Worm and described in detail in Worm’s Museum Wormianium from 1655. Bruun’s edition of The Anatomy House is a welcome contribution to the growing scholarly literature on Danish medical history in the early modern period. It offers valuable insight into the Copenhagen anatomical theatre and into the work of Thomas Bartholin, the period’s most distinguished Danish medical scientist. Not only is the book informative and carefully researched, it is also handsomely produced and includes a large number of fine illustrations. Bartholin would have been pleased. My only, and very minor, complaint is that the name index is mysteriously placed in the middle of the book, separate from the subject index, and includes only persons appearing in Bartholin’s text.