536 Book Reviews

Book Reviews centuries, Denis was the leading advocate in a death knell to such experimentation in the France for transfusing good, healthy blood into ensuing decades. Indeed, the need to gain diseased patients. Such procedures, the consensus from such a divisive professional mathematician noted, had an advantage over body prohibited further attempts at transfusion blood-letting in that the overall blood volume for 150 years. could be maintained. The fact that the donor was Some readers may be bothered by Moore’s non-human was of little consequence to Denis. readiness to skip forward within his chapters, To establish the context surrounding medical filling the readers with more up-to-date wisdom of the period, Moore summarizes information of the subsequent findings about pertinent elements of Cartesian and Harveian blood and transfusion. Indeed, it was a bit philosophy as well as the new experimental disconcerting to jump into twentieth-century philosophy that was being espoused by blood typing and incompatible transfusion England’s Royal Society and emulated by knowledge in the midst of his chapter on ‘Denis’ France’s Acade´mie Royale des Sciences. We route to the top’. Perhaps such information gain a glimpse of the channels through which should have been relegated to an epilogue or men like Denis advocated innovative added to the otherwise helpful timeline of experimental procedures in order to gain favour, seventeenth-century blood transfusion at the thereby accelerating their societal rise. The close of the book. Doing this towards the final rivalries so typical in histories of England and pages would reinforce the timeliness of a history France are played out here in the claim of of blood transfusion. It would also have allowed priority over which nation’s natural philosophers the author to include references leading curious had first uncovered the benefits of blood readers to more thorough histories of the transfusion. importance of blood and modifications of blood Denis transfused some five or six ounces of the transfusion over time. An index would also calf’s blood into Mauroy through a series of have been of immense help. quills that he had connected into one continuous Upon reflection, I am left craving more pipeline. Although not the first time he had medical and scientific history to be delivered in performed such a transfusion into humans, it was such a lively manner. Perhaps BBC television his first time for using this technique in attempt to should be thinking how best to feature Moore’s cure a patient who was deemed physically important historical writing before an even wider well, but mentally deranged. audience, one that it clearly deserves. What initially appeared as an ‘‘incredible cure’’ (p.154), soon took a deleterious pathway Philip K Wilson, upon which, after three transfusions over a series Penn State University College of Medicine of weeks, Mauroy died and Denis was indicted for murder. Using the documentary evidence Walter Bernardi and Luigi Guerrini (eds), from the trial and contemporary European Francesco Redi, un protagonista della scienza medical writings, Moore sets up a debate moderna: documenti, esperimenti, immagini, between all of these authorities in a manner Biblioteca di Nuncius, Studi e Testi 33, Florence, similar to Walter Cronkite’s ‘You Are There’ US Leo S Olschki, 1999, pp. xi, 388, L 75,000 innovative television series of the 1950s. (paperback 88-222-47191). Although this setting is admittedly fictitious, it is believable as it is based solely upon accurate, The twenty papers in this collection aim to contemporary accounts. At the conclusion of this create a comprehensive image of the physician scintillating scene, we find that Denis was and courtier Francesco Redi (1626–1698). The acquitted, but the magistrate’s decision that ‘‘no book is divided into four overlapping sections: transfusion should be made upon any human Redi’s laboratory work as it appears in his body without the approval of the physicians of notebooks; his relationship with the science of his the Parisian Faculty [of Medicine]’’ (p. 205) dealt time; Redi viewed through the social context of 536 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.126, on 29 Sep 2021 at 04:55:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300008218 Book Reviews the Medicis’ Tuscany; and a final section that For Redi what was at issue was the authority covers iconography, archival research and his of the Ancients, which several papers discuss. literary works. The authors have gone to the This controversy is clearly illustrated by the fountain-head and analysed his laboratory debate between Redi and the Jesuit Filippo notebooks—hundreds remain—and show that Buonanni over the spontaneous generation of Redi worked in various experimental traditions. molluscs and fungi studied in Michela Fazzari’s As well as the well-known experiments on paper, Redi’s ambiguous relationship with the insects and vipers, there are other reports in the old tradition of natural history, analysed by notebooks of work on many species including Alessandro Ottaviani, and the linguistic choice marine creatures. In addition there are accounts he made when collaborating in the Crusca of experiments in physics, as shown in Maria Lexicon. Alberto Nocentini describes how, Conforti’s paper on ‘‘glass drops’’ and in unlike his colleagues at the Crusca Academy, he Ferdinando Abbri’s on chemical substances. ordered his lexical entries according to the And behind the experiment one always finds spoken, not the written language. In addition, theoretical issues, from atomism to Oreste Trabucco shows how Redi’s rejection of anti-spontaneism. the authority of Ancients was evident in the way The papers of Antonella Bonciani, Stefano he used anatomy as a weapon against the Casciu`, and Walter Bernardi demonstrate how, Aristotelians. while to all appearances a radical empiricist who Redi was also a physician, and the papers by drew on many sources for his books, including Carla Doni and Domenico Bertoloni Meli discuss iconographic sources, Redi wanted to carry out respectively his practice at the bedside and his empirical work on a large scale and used his relationship with Malpighi on anatomical social and courtier’s skill to this end. He was an research. Michelle Rak studies Redi the writer, entrepreneur with multiple interests who had who was so much the product of the baroque leadership qualities, above all organizational period. In addition, the book contains an abilities. To bring together the hunter and the archival survey of Redi’s library by Lorella scholar, the barber and the poet, in a shared Mangani, a study of the thousands of Redi’s experimental enterprise presupposes manuscripts untouched in Florentine archives by management skills that are not necessarily Piero Scapecchi, and a comprehensive attributes of the courtier. He looked for new bibliography. talent, including artists whom he set to work with Despite what Bernardi calls the failure of microscopes, as Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi Redi’s attempt at ‘‘big science’’, his scholarly describes. His efforts to establish a school were endeavour was carried on by others in France fruitful, and many disciples and scholars and in the rest of Europe during the joined his circle. In cases of scientific Enlightenment. The book shows well how Redi disagreement they performed experiments under reconciled the life of a courtier, and the the supervision of Redi and Malpighi bringing patronage he wielded, with a great number of new facts to light, for instance in the generation experimental enterprises in which there was dispute. Thus if there are good and bad active freedom of research. This new and patrons, Redi probably belonged to the former. complex image allows historians to go beyond Sometimes not claiming authorship for his the easy-to-sell icon of Redi the courtier that writings, he would write important parts of a stems from Paula Findlen’s works. Rebelling book which later appeared under a disciple’s against authority, dogmatism and scholasticism, name, as is revealed by Luigi Guerrini’s paper on Redi actively contributed to shaping new the causes of the shock produced by the torpedo forms of knowledge. signed by Stefano Lorenzini. Another of his roles was that of arbitrator, which, as Susana Go´mez M J Ratcliff, Lo´pez recounts, enabled him to unify the Institut d’Histoire de la Me´decine et de la Sante´, Galilean scholars in a shared endeavour. Universite´ de Geneeve 537 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.126, on 29 Sep 2021 at 04:55:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300008218.

Load more