Book Reviews devote so much of the text to initially amusing but gratuitous and eventually tedious recitations of what the author regards as bizarre therapeutic agents. We hear far too much about such remedies as crocodile dung, dried earthworms, and mummy powder. The overall effect is to trivialize the question why, for example, a practice like bloodletting persisted in use for so long. The reader is invited to smile at past ignorance more than to ask what made such therapies-odd to our

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... aningful to healers and sufferers alike. A history of medicine may well entertain students, but it is unlikely to bring them the deeper and more lasting exhilaration of historical understanding. Despite their shortcomings, Andrew Wear's edited collection Medicine in society (1991) and even Erwin Ackerknecht's Short history of medicine (1955; revised edition 1968) offer much sturdier narrative frameworks upon which instructors and students can lean.