Bulletin of the History of Medicine

"A Word of Caution," begins the introduction: "Although . . . comment is offered on the past and present usage of biomedical terms, emphasis is given to the provenance or origin of these terms rather than their precise definitions" (p. ix). The book is inclusive: one entry begins "abhor is not really a medical term, yet it has physiological significance" (p. 1), and post hoc ergo propter hoc and Pascal's wager also appear as entries. Popular terms such as "funny bone" and "hay fever" are discussed as well. Overlap with the Oxford English Dictionary is slight: it is the author's personal musings, in addition to some etymological information, that distinguish this book from other reference works on the same subject.

This book is about models constructed in Western Europe and the United States from about 1750 to 1950. The models range from tiny to huge, and they encompass, in the words of the editors, "wooden ships and plastic molecules, wax embryos and a perspex economy, monuments in cork and mathematics in plaster, casts of diseases and displays of stuffed animals, anatomies to take apart and extinct monsters rebuilt in bricks and mortar" (p. 1). The book emerged from a conference at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine and the Science Museum in London in 1998. Authors are Malcolm Baker, Renato G. Mazzolini, Simon Schaffer, Christopher Evans, James A. Secord, Nick Hopwood, Thomas Schnalke, Christoph Meinel, Herbert Mehrtens, Lynn K. Nyhart, Soraya de Chadarevian, Mary S. Morgan and Marcel Boumans, Eric Francoeur and Jérôme Segal, James Griesemer, and Ludmilla Jordanova.

With a baker's dozen of contributors, this book discusses the past, present, and future of Mendel's ideas concerning the laws of inheritance in man. Part 1, "The First Fifty Years of Mendelism," contains contributions by Milo Keynes ("The Introduction of Mendelism into Human Genetics"), Michael Bulmer ("Galton's Theory of Ancestral Inheritance"), Eileen Magnello ("The Reception of Mendelism by the Biometricians and the Early Mendelians, 1899–1909"), A. W. F. Edwards ("Mendelism and Man 1918–1939"), and Patrick Bateson ("William Bateson, Archibald Garrod and the Nature of the 'Inborn'"). Part 2, "Human Genetics from 1950," comprises essays by Newton E. Morton ("Linkage and Allelic Association"), Lucio Luzzatto ("Malaria and Darwinian Selection in Human Populations"), Malcolm A. Ferguson-Smith ("Chromosomal Genetics and Evolution"), Timothy M. Cox ("Mendelian Disorders in Man: The Development of Human Genetics"), John Bell ("The Genetics of Complex Diseases"), Alfred G. Knudson ("Human Cancer Genetics"), and D. J. Weatherall ("Genetics and the Future of Medicine"). An Appendix reprints William Bateson's article "Problems of Heredity as a Subject for Horticultural Investigation" from the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, where it was originally published in 1901.

The first edition of this book was reviewed in the Bulletin by Christopher Lawrence, who termed it "for the most part . . . a valuable collection" (BHM, 1983, 57: 319–20, quotation on p. 320). The serious omission noted by our reviewer has been corrected: in this...