Acupuncture, expertise and cross-cultural medicine

thought on the subject, to the European Middle Ages characterized here as "The Age of Faith", to the impact of the European voyages of reconnaissance and the neo-Hippocratic reassertions of the eighteenth century. Thereafter Barrett's strategy is to work biographically. Identifying key figures-Hoffman, Lind and especially Finke for the eighteenth century, Boudin, Tschudi and Schweich for the early nineteenth, and so on into the midtwentieth century-Barrett provides thumbnail biographical sketches and proceeds to summarize their main works, appending commentary on reviews where he could find them. A concluding survey of medical cartography provides a thematic overview of that subject. Industrious though Barrett's work undoubtedly is, it none the less suffers from a number of serious drawbacks. Primarily, in chapter after chapter, Barrett feels the need to judge his historical subjects on the adequacy of how they define the relations between "medical geography" and "geographical medicine". Witness: JeanPierre Bonnafont is castigated because he "does not define what he means by medical geography" (p. 195); Ferdinand Becker is censured because he "confuses the distinction between medical geography and geographical medicine" (p. 213); Jean Christian Boudin is reproved because he considers that "medical geography is a 'branch of medicine'" (p. 218). These are not isolated cases: a myriad others are reprimanded for their perceived definitional incompetences, while others are lauded for sustaining the distinction. August Hirsch, for example, gets it wrong; Adalbert Muhry gets it right. In one form or another, terminological fixation persistently reasserts itself. James Lind, we are told, did not use the term "medical geography" but his work "is fundamentally medical geography" (p. 135). The retrospective application of Barrett's definitions on the historical record gives the work an apologetic feel in many places; it is as though the author is engaged in a form of disciplinary self-justification by prosecuting the case for which zone of the academic grove (whether medicine or geography) is the essential home for certain kinds of activities. A second troublesome feature of Barrett's analysis is his tendency to slip into an outmoded "warfare" account of the relationship between Christianity and medical science. When he reports as a key finding of his inquiries that the "growth of Christianity thwarted the development of medicine in general" (p. 524), this can be sustained only at the expense of ignoring the corpus of revisionist work for instance by Gary Ferngren and Darrel Amundsenon the historical relations between medicine and religion. The desacralizing of medical discourse, for example, simply cannot be read as a rejection of traditional religion either in the Greek or early Christian eras. Finally, the entire work proceeds by summarizing the writings of a wide range of individuals. Long extracts, detailed synopses, and lengthy abstracts, frequently annexed to biographical sketches, characterize vast stretches of the book. What is lacking is a clear interpretative thrust. Little theoretical engagement means that the text is rather more a chronological digest of medical-geographical writings than a work of historical interrogation sustained by a compelling line of argument. Having said this, Geography and disease will prove to be an invaluable resource for students of medical history by virtue of its exhaustive surveying of a fugitive, and understudied, literature in the European medicogeographical tradition.