Physician to the West: Selected Writings of Daniel Drake on Science and Society by Henry D.Shapiro; Zane L. Miller; The Journals of Joseph N. Nicollet: A Scientist on the MississippiHeadwaters with Notes on Indian Life, 1836-37 by Martha Coleman Bray; Andre FerteyReview by: John E. CaswellIsis, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Jun., 1972), pp. 286-288Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/229086 .

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286 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 63 * 2 - 217 (1972)

Petersburg, added courses in physics and mathematics to the first four years of medical studies. It also required a qualifying ex- amination at the end of the third year to determine which students might continue in medicine. A 1795 program, which stemmed from the curricular plans at the universities of Paris, Strasbourg, and Vienna, instituted further improvements. It shortened medical studies from seven to five years and intro- duced a "degree in surgery" at the end of the fourth year. Through these reforms and her financial support, Catherine II increased the number of medical students in Russia and the quality of their education. Under Peter the Great there was a peak of 125 doctors. In 1780 Russia had 308 doctors, 308 wound physicians (surgeons), and 616 subsurgeons, most of whom were connected with the military. Such progress did not occur without impediments, however. Many of these doctors were foreign, especially German. The Russian boyars (nobles) often resented these outsiders and opposed their work.

Still the medical profession advanced slowly in Russia, as the Table of Medical Ranks of 1799 showed. This document abolished the subsurgeon position in the army and navy, indicating that better- trained personnel existed to perform their duties. A summary of its financial and status sections follows:

SALARY PER ANNUM RANK (in rubles)

1707 1799 1722 1799

Doctor 800 800-1000 Capt. Maj.

Surgeon 300 300400 1st Lt. Capt.

Subsurgeon 120 200-250 - Lt. (Asst. (Asst. Surg.) Surg.)

Importantly, although salaries increased little, the pensions adopted for physicians in 1762 were continued in 1799. The higher officer ranks also raised the status of the medical personnel in the civil society.

While in general the research on the sub- ject matter is carefully done, the book is not without its faults. Its extreme brevity-120 pages of text-does not afford the author sufficient space to develop his ideas; con- sequently, the result is basically a catalogue. For instance, the initial account of military health services in other European countries lists their major achievements but does not clearly connect these with similar develop- ments in Russia. In addition, the Russian

military physicians appear in a scientific vacuum. Perhaps a fuller understanding of the challenges they faced and their suc- cesses might be imparted by placing them within the total scientific community, which Alexander Vucinich considers in his Science in Russian Culture, A History to 1860 (Stan- ford Univ. Press, 1963). Finally, a wandering chronology mars the book. The entire eighteenth century is covered several times in succession within chapters, which makes it difficult for the reader to place develop- ments in a proper time sequence.

The Russian Military Physician in the Eighteenth Century is recommended to readers interested in early modern Russian history and the social history of medicine. Few current publications exist on this subject, which Professor Muiller-Dietz has taken the lead in investigating. It is hoped that in the future his outline book will be fleshed out into a full-length manuscript.

RONALD CALINGER Department of History and Political Science

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York 12181

Henry D. Shapiro; Zane L. Miller (Editors). Physician to the West: Selected Writings of Daniel Drake on Science and Society. xxxviii + 418 pp., 1 plt., illus., map, bibl. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970. $12.50.

Martha Coleman Bray (Editor). The Journals of Joseph N. Nicollet: A Scientist on the Mississippi Headwaters with Notes on Indian Life, 1836-37. Translatedfrom the French by Andre' Fertey. xviii + 288 pp., 12 illus., index. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1970. $16.50.

These two volumes present original writings of two contemporaries born only a year apart-Daniel Drake in 1785 and Joseph Nicollet in 1786-who have a common claim to remembrance based on their ex- ploration and description of the Mississippi Valley. Living at a period when science was becoming professionalized, both represented that trend. In most other respects their lives ran in quite different channels.

Born in New Jersey, removed as a toddler to Kentucky, and apprenticed at age fifteen to a physician in Cincinnati, Drake completed

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 63 * 2 - 217 (1972) 287

his formal medical education at the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania. There he attended lectures for a few months under Benjamin Rush and possibly natural history or materia medica lectures under Benjamin Smith Barton. Returning to the Ohio Valley, Drake spent most of the next four decades in Cincinnati, Lexington, and Louisville. His contribution to the establishment of medical institutions in these cities has been told in the standard modern biography, Emmet Field Horine's Daniel Drake (1785-1852): Pioneer Physician of the Midwest (Phila- delphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1961). I came away from that volume impressed with the conflict and frustrationsthat marked Drake's services on medical faculties.

The present book puts Drake in a some- what different light. A number of the selec- tions are from addresses that Drake made in his role as civic leader and founder, not only of medical schools, but of a variety of cultural institutions. Philosophically a Bacon- ian devoted to observation and inductive generalization, he was also a Baconian in recognizing the need to create institutions for the encouragement of learning. Politi- cally he was a Whig, opposed equally to the rigidities of Federalism and the irra- tionalities of the Jacksonian mob.

Drake's scientific work is represented primarily in two items: his earliest publica- tion (1808) on epidemic diseases in his home village in Kentucky and a selection from his magnum opus, a book of over 1,100 pages entitled Systematic Treatise on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America (1850). One might well wish for one or two examples from the many short clinical writeups he published in the two medical journals he edited. Two of the items are on Cincinnati (1810, 1815), the latter furnishing detailed and precise in- formation such as a naturalist or a pro- spective immigrant would desire-in Drake's words, "our natural and commercial geo- graphy." He concluded with an analysis of the current and possible future relations of Cincinnati and its rivals which might be called "interurban geopolitics." In "The People's Doctors," Drake launched an attack on the quackery of his day and the careless habits of druggists.

Elsewhere we see Drake as a civic leader urging the need for schools, museums, medical colleges. In his comments on the

West and the nature of Western society, we pick out concepts foreshadowing Frederick Jackson Turner, then realize that many of these ideas had been abroad for years before Turner reduced them to a system. Drake's activities in promoting industry are reflected in a selection on construction of a railroad from Cincinnati intended to link eventually with lines in tidewater Georgia.

For the historian of science the principal interest is in Drake's study of epidemic diseases and the environmental factors which might have been predisposing to the epi- demic. To the historian of the West there are several values: description of the Ohio Valley, evidence on health conditions, the creation and development of social institutions. Those who see themselves as neither right nor left, but as creative members of the center, may feel a kinship with Drake. The editors' introductions serve to portray Drake as an integrated personality and apply a needed corrective to Horine's biography.

While Drake was seeking to create a culture in the Ohio Valley, Joseph Nicollet was exploring the headwaters of the Missis- sippi, making maps and visiting with the Indians. Nicollet was a French mathemati- cian and astronomer, the "favored protege" of Laplace at the Paris Observatory. A Catholic of aristocratic leanings and friend of the wealthy during the Bourbon restoration, he was ruined both socially and financially by the revolution of 1830. He slipped out of France and in 1832 at the age of forty-six reached America.

Here he won the friendship of Ferdinand Hassler at the Coast Survey. Admiring Alexander von Humboldt, Nicollet decided to emulate him by making an intensive sur- vey of the Mississippi River system. Be- ginning in December 1832 he spent eleven years in tracing the Mississippi from New Orleans to its headwaters and in elucidating the relations between that stream, the Missouri, and the Red River of the North.

This volume includes two journals of Nicollet's first visit to the area around Fort Snelling, now Minnesota, in 1836-1837, and accounts of Chippewa war customs, their raising of children, and their medicine cere- monials. Nicollet found the passing scene interesting and recorded it with accuracy and verve. Would that more explorers had as good a style! Of the dozens of explorers' descriptions of native peoples, seldom

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288 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 63 * 2 * 217 (1972)

have I read one that is as detailed, well written, and credible.

Historians of science will find this a useful piece in the jigsaw of Western exploration. Historians of the frontier will use it for the many insights into Indian-white relations. Anthropologists will find something on Chippewa customs and beliefs. The editor's annotations are well done and useful. One may hope that a full biography of Nicollet will be forthcoming.

JoHN E. CASWELL Department of History

Stanislaus State College Turlock, California 95380

NINETEENTH & TWENTIETH CENTURIES

Walter Brednow. Dietrich Georg Kieser, Sein Leben und Werk. (Sudhoffs Archiv, Zeitschrift fir Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Heft 12.) 176 pp., index. Wiesbaden:Franz Steiner, 1970. DM 38 (paper).

Although scarcely remembered today, Dietrich Georg Kieser (1779-1862) was in his day a prominent physician and academician whose long career touched upon a wide range of contemporary themes and events. Above all he was an exemplar of the German tradition of Naturphilosophie. Throughout his medical studies at Got- tingen's Georgia Augusta University and his subsequent medical and academic career, primarily at the University of Jena, Kieser associated and collaborated with Germany's foremost Naturphilosophen, including Goethe, Karl Himley, Lorenz Oken, and Friedrich Schelling. The Naturphilosoph's traditional themes of cosmic analogy and universal harmony permeated his extensive writings in biology, medicine, botany, and anatomy. Walter Brednow's account of Kieser's interaction with the Naturphilosophen provides a rare view into the inner workings of this still-obscure scientific-phil- osophical network.

One of Brednow's most illuminating and original chapters reveals how these philo- sophical inclinations (combined with in- terests in clinical medicine) drew Kieser to mesmerism and animal magnetism. Aside from publishing articles and books on the

new phenomena, Kieser co-founded and edited the journal Archiv far den thierischen Magnetismus (1817-1825). Stressing this aspect of Kieser's thought, Brednow has explored some of the previously overlooked relationships between Romantic Natur- philosophie and Mesmer's influential doc- trines-relationships inviting further histori- cal attention.

Kieser's continuing devotion to Natur- philosophie was tempered by more practical concerns. Whatever Kieser's contribution to scientific thought, Brednow argues con- vincingly that he should be remembered for his leading role in the German scientific and academic communities. In 1824 he was appointed Ordinary Professor of Medicine at the University of Jena, where he had long tenures as dean of the medical faculty and vice-chancellor (Prorektor) of the academic senate. He was chosen in 1831 to represent the university at the Landtag of Saxe- Weimar and, in 1848, served as a member of the Frankfurt Parliament. Caught up in the political ferment and student movements of his day, Kieser actively opposed the Met- ternich regime and supported the student quest for German national unity.

Kieser was especially noted for his organizational achievements. In his early career he designed spas near Gdttingen and Jena and later pioneered in the establishment of German psychiatric clinics. One of the highest honors of his career was to organize and preside over the 1836 Jena meeting of Oken's Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher undArzte. In 1858 he was appointed president of the prestigious Leopoldina (Kaiserliche Leopoldinisch-Carolinischen Akademie der Naturforscher), which he vainly strove to reorganize along national lines in accord with his vision of German national unity.

Relying almost exclusively on contempor- ary sources, published and manuscript, Brednow has written a brief but useful biography, successfully integrating the scien- tific and administrative aspects of Kieser's career. The essential tension between Kieser's faith in Naturphilosophie and the practical demands of his medical and administrative work is subtly portrayed. The author also raises larger issues about the role of Natur- philosophie in German science and the de- velopment of Germany's scientific institu- tions. Brednow has rescued Kieser from un- deserved obscurity and made a clear case for

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