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Apart from its general relationship to the history of medicine in general, as Professor Laignel-Lavastine of Paris, in his short prefaces, notes its special significance of medicine as seen from the standpoint of the sick individual. It is this aspect that finds expression in this very delightful collection of 130 caricatures imbedded in some 140 pages of text.
It is fairly well recognized that one facet of caricature is to belittle what one fears and the doctor has always had his detractors, large and small, trivial or malignant, because of the fear of death and of its inevitableness. Not all the wish-fulfilling magic in the world has changed this.
It is both instructing and amusing to turn these pages which illustrate from the days of paleolithic man the desire of mankind in some way to project this inadequacy upon the person or activities of the doctor. These earlier detractors possessed neither the wit nor the satire of a Molière, a Tolstoi, nor the fanaticism of a Ghandi, but they had their fun at the doctor's expense. The earliest epochs are barely touched upon, the story begins with the danse macabres of the late Middle Ages, goes on through the Renaissance, the Molière siécle, and then takes up the moderns, Rowlandson, the period of lampooning of Jenner, Mesmer, and Gall, and finally presents an excellent collection of the work of Daumier and the more modern illustrators.
We can recommend this volume of the Collection Hippocrate edited by Professor Laignel-Lavastine.