Ackerknecht, Erwin. H.

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Book Reviewsand hard work took him all the way from the bottom of the medical career ladder to the summitof civic virtue and stylish Tory rural conservatism. It is good to have such a well-documentedstudy of a medical beneficiary of Leamington's waters, and of the nineteenth-century gentry'sdetermination to be permanently ill without being (medically) bled.Michael NeveUnit for the History of Medicine, University College LondonKARL Y. OUGGENHEIM, Nutrition and nutritional diseases. The evolution of concepts,Lexington, Mass., and Toronto, Collamore Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. xii, 378, illus., [no pricestated].Although quite a few of the topics in this book have been discussed during the last decades,e.g. in the works of McCollum, Partington, Florkin, or Mendelsohn, it is a welcome addition toour literature and has a character and a value of its own. It shows how food was seen asbuilding-material and a source of energy from Hippocrates to Maimonides. It relates the newconcepts of the seventeenth century, e.g. of van Helmont on ferments, Santorio on insensibleperspiration, Boyle and Mayow on respiration and combustion. Of the nineteenth century, theauthor reports, among other achievements, the work of Liebig, Voit, Rubner, and Atwater onenergy production, Prout's classification of foodstuffs, and the metabolism studies of Bidder,Schmidt, Pettenkofer, Voit, Claude Bernard, and Schoenheimer. The twentieth-centurydiscovery of vitamins which brought basic changes to the "adequate diet" concept is discussed.The second half of the book is devoted to well-written histories of seven primary nutritionaldiseases (scurvy, rickets, pellagra, etc). The difficulty of advancing from the concept of parasiticdisease to that of deficiency disease is duly emphasized. There seems no point in carping hereabout what to me are minor omissions (the work of R. R. Williams, the rise of hereditaryrickets, etc.). Among the attractions of the book are the short biographical sketchesaccompanying the discussion of the concepts. The publisher should hire a better proof-reader.Erwin H. AckerknechtZurichMICHAEL MITTERAUER and REINHARD SIEDER, The European family. Patriarchyand partnership from the Middle Ages to the present, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, pp. xv,235, £16.00 (£7.50 paperback).This survey of family formation and family structure in Europe from the Middle Ages isthoroughly welcome. It synthesizes a mass of secondary literature (without, however, probinghistoriographical conflict) and at the same time embodies the authors' major researches intofamily history within the Austrian Empire. Its syle is admirably free from the technical jargonof demographic historians and of sociologese, and the translators, Karla Oosterveen andManfred Horzinger, have produced a rendering which mercifully is not glued word-for-word tothe original German (though its reading is perhaps a trifle loose in places: "farmer" is used toooften where "peasant agriculturalist" is meant). Mitterauer and Sieder are free of the naYvetyand Whiggism of Shorter and the occasional eccentricities of Laslett (they also lack hisbrilliance); and their focus on Central Europe is a valuable complement to the francocentricityof, say, Flandrin and the anglocentric approach of Macfarlane. The book's major drawback liesin attempting to trace its subject from the Middle Ages to the present in fewer than 200 pages.This, coupled with a generalizing sociological ambition and a paucity of individual examples,causes an occasional slide into banality - in the modern world, they write, "wives. . . frequentlychannel their sexual energies into over-mothering grown-up children and grandchildren, ordivert them into religious or social and charitable activities".The title of the English version does the authors an injustice. They are at pains to stress therewas no single, uniform, European family. Family forms differed vastly according to region, reli-gion, and economy. Moreover, they insist, pace Shorter, there has been no simple unidirectional"evolution" of the family. We are indeed familiar with these points from Laslett and Flandrin,but they bear reiteration. What is relatively new in Mitterauer and Sieder is their patient and485available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300042162Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 09:17:42, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Book Review: Nutrition and nutritional diseases. The evolution of concepts: OuggenheimKarl Y., Nutrition and nutritional diseases. The evolution of concepts, Lexington, Mass., and Toronto, Collamore Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. xii, 378, illus., [no price stated]

Book Review: Nutrition and nutritional diseases. The evolution of concepts: OuggenheimKarl Y., Nutrition and nutritional diseases. The evolution of concepts, Lexington, Mass., and Toronto, Collamore Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. xii, 378, illus., [no price stated]

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