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REVIEWS THE CAMBRIDGE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF MEDICINE. Edited by Roy Porter. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp.400. £ 24.95. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine joins a series which includes illustrated histories of such diverse subjects as warfare and archaeology. Its ten chapters (four of which are from the editor, Roy Porter) provide surveys of the history of disease, the rise of medicine, primary care, the rise of drug treatment. The temporal focus is broad, ranging from population crises among hunter gatherers 4.5 million years ago to the future of gene therapy at the end of the twentieth century. And so, too, is the geographical spread, which covers developed and developing countries, although not universally in all chapters. Porter has brought together a range of talented authors, and it is not easy to single out particular contributions. Vivien Nutton provides a careful analysis of the rise of medicine from its Babylonian and Egyptian forebears. Edward Shorter's survey of the development of primary care gives admirable and telling anecdotal material about the limited repertoire of the nineteenth-century doctor and the shifting balance between patient and practitioner. Roy Porter's survey of changing responses to mental illness covers ground on which he has written many times before. It thus provides an excellent introductory survey, encompassing the many debates in this contentious area and introducing them with a light touch. Porter, as before, challenges Foucault's notion of 'great confinement' in eighteenth- century European treatment of insanity, locating the treatment of the mad rather as the 'mad business' and part of expanding consumer society. He traces the depressing story whereby the therapeutic optimism originally expressed through the establishment of asylums had dissipated into theories of hereditary degeneracy by the end of the nineteenth century. John Pickstone, as the author of a chapter on medicine, society and the state, has an almost impossible task. He takes on this large canvas with assurance, surveying the shifting balances over time between orthodox