The rise and decline of the scholastic `Quaestio Disputata': with special emphasis on its use in the teaching of medicine and science

the years around 1700, while damning the persistent presence of theoretical inquiries-he calls them "philosophical meanderings" (p. 170)-concerning generation. Because early modem medical interest in monstrous births was largely motivated and structured by debates on generation, Wilson's intolerance of, and unfamiliarity with them renders this aspect of his book at best unrevealing. Yet he does not do much better with the early history of anatomical approaches to monstrosity, to which he claims to be more sympathetic. A number of sixteenth-century anatomists, including Berengario da Carpi, Andreas Vesalius, and Realdo Colombo, had much to say about the range of human variation based on their own dissections, yet their names do not even appear in the index. In fact, the shape and chronology of Wilson's argument appears to be largely an artefact of his almost exclusive reliance on vernacular sources. His contention that the years around 1700 saw the emergence of a new, medical and "scientific" (i.e. anatomical) approach to monstrous births amounts for the most part only to the observation that anatomists and medical theorists were increasingly writing in the vernacular rather than in Latin. Wilson is misleading and unreliable as a historian of medicine, and his work generally lacks an analytical edge. But his survey of sixteenthand seventeenth-century vernacular and lay texts is a real contribution, and he has provided many useful references for which both cultural historians and historians of the body will be grateful.