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134 Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. 63, January 2008

(sleeping sickness) in lay terms; and a reference to a chapter in the past
tense that appears only later in the volume.
In sum, however, this volume will certainly remain the definitive work
on this subject for years—and perhaps decades—to come, and any book
that rivals or surpasses Doing Medicine Together will have had to have
depended on it for the great bulk of its documentation, argument, and
insight.
doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrm041
Advance Access Publication on December 8, 2007

WAYNE WILD. Medicine-by-Post. The Changing Voice of Illness in

Eighteenth-Century British Consultation Letters and Literature.
The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine, Clio Medica 79.
Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2006. v, 286 pp., illus. $78.00.
Reviewed by ANITA GUERRINI, Ph.D., Department of History,
University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106-9410.

Wayne Wild uses medical correspondence from eighteenth-century

Britain, supported by literary examples, to examine changes in medical
theory and practice and in the image of the physician. Fortunately for
historians, medical consultation in this era often took place via mail,
resulting in a wealth of primary source material available in the archives.
Although many historians have exploited these resources, Wild is the first
to my knowledge to pay attention to the epistolary format itself and what
it reveals about the changing rhetorical methods that physicians employed
over the century. He focuses in particular on three physicians, James Jurin,
George Cheyne, and William Cullen, who, he claims, illustrate three
stages of medical rhetoric: the “new science,” the language of sensibility,
and an Enlightenment emphasis on individual subjectivity, respectively.
In his first chapter, Wild introduces these themes, employing letters
written by Samuel Johnson about his health to his doctors and others, as
well as the fictional letter-writers Matthew Bramble (in Tobias Smollett’s
Humphry Clinker) and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Johnson’s letters in
particular make vivid and compelling reading, and this section nicely comp-
lements Helen Deutsch’s recent Loving Dr. Johnson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005). Letters also, Wild argues, reveal a developing code of
medical ethics and etiquette.
James Jurin (1684 – 1750) was a secretary of the Royal Society and one
of the first to apply statistics to medicine in his study of the efficacy of
smallpox inoculation. Wild analyzes Jurin’s correspondence with his
 Book Reviews 135
patients, and they with him, as examples of the “scientific” rhetoric
fostered by iatromechanism. Wild characterizes this as an emphasis on
precise detail, responsible witnesses, and even in some cases experimen-
tation. In one case, Jurin favored the account of a surgeon over that of
the patient himself because the surgeon’s style of communication was,
argues Wild, more in keeping with the style of scientific communication.
A series of letters to Jurin from Bishop Mordechai Cary demonstrate that
this rhetoric was also adopted by patients. The theme of patient expertise
could have been further discussed; at one point Wild asserts that the new
science is part of the popular press but gives no examples.
Although George Cheyne (1671 –1743) began his career as a iatrome-
chanist, Wild argues that he abandoned this position in favor of a new
emphasis on nerves and sensibility. But these ideas are not mutually exclu-
sive, and in his published works, at least, Cheyne retained a notion of the
body as a hydraulic system while focusing on the nerves in particular.
Wild offers a sustained analysis of Cheyne’s correspondence from the
1730s and 40s with the Countess of Huntingdon and Samuel Richardson.
He charts through these letters the development of Cheyne’s distinctive
therapeutic persona. Cheyne was a patient as well as a physician, and as
Wild points out, his correspondence reveals a new emphasis on subjective
experience. However, a look at Cheyne’s correspondence about patients
with Hans Sloane in the 1720s would have added another dimension to
this discussion. Indeed, Sloane, the most successful practitioner of the era,
makes only a brief appearance in Wild’s text, even though he left reams of
correspondence.
Wild argues that the further development of the notion of sensibility,
particularly in Scotland, led to a third form of epistolary rhetoric that
positively valued sensibility while at the same time reflecting a more
utilitarian philosophy. The Edinburgh physician William Cullen
(1710 – 1790) epitomizes these values, as evidenced by an enormous
archive of over 3000 letters. Wild argues that earlier “scientific” rhetoric
downplayed the individual experience of the patient, and that Cullen in
particular restored it. I am not entirely convinced that the individual
patient ever disappeared from view, however “scientific” the explanations
of disease. But this aside, Wild offers a richly detailed account of Cullen’s
correspondence.
In his final chapter, Wild returns to more specifically literary concerns,
offering further examples from eighteenth-century fiction to support his
classification of rhetorical styles in medical correspondence. While I
found this classification to be overly schematic, Wild’s book nonetheless
convincingly asserts the importance of rhetorical analysis to an under-
standing of medical practice in this period, and the letters themselves,
136 Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. 63, January 2008
which are liberally quoted, tell a fascinating story. This book is useful
both for the historian and the literary critic. Unfortunately, the pro-
duction values of the book detract from its value, with a plethora of typos
and some unfortunate lapses of copy editing.
doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrm042
Advance Access Publication on December 9, 2007

JAMES COLGROVE. State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in

Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley, California, University of California
Press, 2006. xiii, 332 pp., illus. $39.95.
Reviewed by ALEXANDRA MINNA STERN, Ph.D., Center for the History
of Medicine, University of Michigan, 100 Simpson Memorial Institute,
102 Observatory, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-0725.

Vaccination tops the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s list
of the ten great public health achievements of the twentieth century.
Indeed, since the early 1900s American society has been transformed by
the development, administration, and acceptance of vaccines against dis-
eases such as diphtheria, polio, and measles, just to name a few. In State of
Immunity, James Colgrove traces this fascinating and important history,
delivering an elegant and original contribution to the history of medicine
and to health policy. Although various scholars have addressed facets of
the drama of immunization in the United States, usually by focusing on a
particular vaccine or disease, Colgrove weaves many threads together to
produce an encompassing and nicely paced narrative.
State of Immunity begins in the decades leading up to the U.S. Supreme
Court decision Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), which upheld the state’s
right to vaccinate for the common good. Colgrove fleshes out the context
and characters behind this landmark case and demonstrates how it and the
legal impulse to place the collective before the individual helped to fuel
anti-vaccination sentiment, which reached a zenith during the Progressive
Era. Colgrove then shows how tides shifted in the 1920s and 1930s as
coercive vaccination practices fell out of favor and public health officials
turned increasingly to campaigns of persuasion to promote and “sell”
immunization. In a chapter devoted to the diphtheria toxin – antitoxin in
New York City, Colgrove demonstrates how the rise of education and
advertising, in concert with the idealization of the physician as primary
care provider, converged to produce a new health ethos in which vacci-
nation eventually became routine. In 1947, overwhelming public faith in
vaccines was demonstrated by the massive mobilization of New Yorkers