Medici e società. Bartolomeo Sella nel Piemonte dell'ottocento

volume by Vincent Barras and Louis-Courvoisier, La medecine des lumie'res (2000), a study of the famous Lausanne physician Samuel-Andre-Auguste-David Tissot. The revival of interest in an individual such as Jurine is thus symptomatic of a recent surge of activity in the history of Swiss French medicine. Although contributors acknowledge that Jurine's fame during his lifetime was a product of his surgical expertise, the majority of the papers treat Jurine's natural historical work, ranging from meticulous studies of his collection and the role of systematics in his classificatory work to individual treatments of specific fields of interest, from bats, insects, freshwater crustaceans and fish to the formation of mountains and monsters. Jurine is revealed as a successor to a natural historical tradition of painstaking experimental and observational practice, begun in Geneva by Charles Bonnet, in which the study of animal design and function revealed Providential forethought, economy and harmony. Marc Ratcliff argues that Jurine's model of function was closer to that shared by eighteenth-century medical practitioners than to the new comparative anatomy of Cuvier and Parisian naturalists. Rene Sigrist and Patrick Bungener show that he differed from such individuals in other ways-rather than adopting the natural method wholeheartedly , he continued to view debates over classification in operational terms, with a pragmatic caution about systems and theories. His diversity as a naturalist was supported both by his skill as a dissector, acquired in surgical training, and by the artistic assistance of his daughter Christine. The contributors are at pains to remark that their enterprise is not one of restoring Jurine to a rightful place in the history of Swiss medicine. Rather, they ask why Jurine's fame declined so rapidly, and raise the question of how Jurine's different experimental, practical and theoretical enterprises interrelated. Here, however, I felt that the exclusive focus on Jurine tended to undermine the explicit purpose of the joint project, by allotting insufficient attention to Jurine's dependency on networks of clients, scientific peers, and particular social groups. Jurine's public life during this period, which encompassed intense upheaval and revolution as Geneva's sovereignty shifted during the 1790s and 1800s, is rapidly passed over with the comment that the surgeon was not very politically active. As a result, the dramatic effects that such shifts could have upon the possibilities opening up for someone like Jurine in this period-a bourgeois rather than a patrician member of the oligarchy, a surgeon rather …