The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England.

The book is a detailed survey of seventeenth-century English responses to miscarriage (and related conditions like stillbirth and neonatal death), plague, syphilis, and smallpox. Without adhering to a rigid division, in each section or chapter the author tries to cover responses in the period's medical, religions, and personal prose, as well as in (usually funerary) poetry. The author also suggests what he believes links our period to the seventeenth century and what was specific to the past, as for instance in the following sentence from the chapter on miscarriage: "The self-blame and guilt that grieving mothers naturally feel seem exacerbated by the complex of religious and social values of the seventeenth century" (81), in this case female self-loathing tasting of the "bitter fruits of Eve," as Anselment entitles the chapter. At the same time he suggests that accounts of mourning for victims (in letters, diaries, and poems) also adumbrate the phases of grieving which modern psychologists have distinguished.

While there is considerable overlap between these chapters (since grieving for victims of different diseases may, after all, be conventionalized similarly), the author's emphasis is on differences, which mainly have to do with the ways society rationalizes a disease. Thus Anselment shows that in the case of smallpox "the unpredictability of the inevitable" (185) magnified the feelings of vulnerability and betrayal experienced after the death of a family member. "Parents faced childbirth fully aware of the fearful risks of delivery and the perilous first weeks of life. The dangers were often greater and the period of risk longer in epidemics of the plague, but again here as well as with the threat of venereal disease the chance of misfortune and death could be anticipated and perhaps in some instances limited" (185). In short, of all the pathological conditions surveyed here, smallpox appears in our terms most clearly as a disease, not a biblical curse or syndrome of parental or personal weakness.

In my view, the book's greatest limitation is its failure to tease out ideological divisions or at least points of controversy in the seventeenth century, as for example those that existed between the conception of the physician-priest (29) and secular notions of the physician, between believers in the usefulness of astrology to curing and physicians skeptical of astrology, or between Galenists and Paracelsians. Like the other debates, the one mentioned last is briefly invoked (28), but - as so often in this book - the author almost immediately focuses on what unites the century. I also have some minor quibbles: Robert Burton should not be quoted according to the Floyd Dell, but according to the new Oxford edition (28); and for Philip Barrough's Methode of Physicke, the date of 1652 is given while the book is Elizabethan (first ed., 1583).

In spite of its limitations, this book is based on admirable archival work, especially in personal records and diaries; it well complements other recent studies of disease in the early modern period, such as those by Greg Bentley and Johannes Fabricius on syphilis. It represents necessary spade-work from which others will profit.

WINFRIED SCHLEINER University of California, Davis