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It is surely not unfair to call Dr. Robinson's book a popularization of medical history—indeed, its title states as much; for it may be said at once that it is a popularization in the better sense of that term, in almost complete measure avoiding the vices of superficiality, inaccuracy and disproportioned emphasis upon the dramatic or the sensational to which that type of literary product is frequently only too prone.
As a matter of fact, Dr. Robinson has written, in a pleasant and extremely fluent style, a thoroughly readable and entertaining account of the history of medicine—or, more accurately, perhaps, of the figures of medical history. In accomplishing this result, he has given slightly undue space and importance, as it may be thought, to anecdote and to biographical and personal detail—as for example in devoting nine pages to the activities of the famous and infamous Burke and Hare, and more than four to the rather chequered personal career of the anatomist Henle. Obviously, those who favor this technique will say that he has taken Herodotus as his model; those who do not, that he verges too often upon the merely gossipy. And of the philosophical Anschauung that informs Charles Singer's delightful Short History of Medicine or Sigerist's Man and Medicine, recently reviewed in these pages, there is relatively little. On the other hand, an outstanding merit of the book is the skill with which the author has placed the figures of his narrative against a briefly but incisively outlined background of the intellectual and cultural characteristics of their times, so that, within necessarily rather severe limits, he may be said to have written his story of medicine largely in the spirit of his own words: "Medicine is not an isolated branch of learning; it is a part of general culture."
Although Freud appears among the twelve Illuminati listed on the dustcover, he receives exactly one page in the text (as compared with four alloted to Brown-Séquard, for example); th