BOOK REVIEWS

side-effects of the hazardous cure-intense salivation, foul breath, slurred speech and impaired vision etc.-without demonstrating an understanding of how nineteenth-century practitioners perceived that mercury actually acted upon the disease itself (pp. 57-60). However, the rest of Chapter 3 fares better in this respect, not only in enumerating the different herbal and chemical remedies that surgeons used aboard ship, but in generally explaining the nature of their action. 'Batting Scurvy', which remained a problem whenever fresh rations ran out, wins and deserves a chapter of its own. However, for the most part, this is not a book that contributes much that is new to our understanding of sea surgeons' medical practice; it is, rather, a fine testament to a historian who writes accessibly and clearly loves her subject. This volume, containing the contributions to a 1998 conference, examines two broad questions in Renaissance science; the relation of confessional belief to scientific ideas, and the impact of new discoveries on religious (mainly Jewish) writers. Both questions are significant, but, as the editors admit, the answers here are little more than trial sondages. By including Judaism, the volume breaks away from a traditional Protestant/Catholic division, and many will find the essays on Jewish science the most valuable, simply because their largely descriptive style makes them accessible to non-specialists. Alongside some familiar faces, Melanchthon, the Jesuits (caught between science and theology), Paracelsus, and Renaissance anatomy, are others less well-known-geography and Prussian Calvinism. This is a potentially valuable collection, yet one whose individual parts never quite coalesce into a satisfactory whole. In part this is the result of the sheer scale of the enterprise. The discussion of Jewish science in the Ottoman empire (defined as 1450 to 1600), although offering interesting insights, never develops them in detail, and leaves one asking for more-or for the sort of socio-historical study carried out for the Moriscos by Luis Garcia-Ballester. By contrast, the study of the writings of the Mantuan Jewish physician Abraham Portaleone (1542-1612) is extremely narrowly focused. Ofgreater interest to medical historians will be the two essays on religion and anatomy by Helm and Cunningham. Helm compares the teaching of anatomy at two universities with widely differing confessional stances, Lutheran Wittenberg and Jesuit Ingolstadt, concluding that while there was no difference in substance or method, anatomy occupied a different place in each curriculum. At Ingolstadt it formed part of medical education only, at Wittenberg it was …