to gain control, men had to "reconceptualize the phenomenon of birth and bring to it a different meaning from the one it had in the hands of the midwives." (p. 21) Oh dear, how did they do that? By declaring the body to be a machine, rather than the natural organism the midwives considered it to be, and then constantly fiddling with the machine in order to improve its performance. Forty dreadful pages, the "scientific approach" constantly in sneering quotation marks, then a section on how the man-midwives and physicians booted the poor old woman-midwives out the door. These pages stand the historical record directly on its head. Arney says that eighteenth-century midwives, who had only "nature" to buttress their claims, were pushed out by doctors who now argued that, since birth was not a "natural matter", only men and their instruments could attend it. In fact, as Arney could have discovered by simply reading the obstetrical textbooks of men like Fielding Ould or-William Smellie, the new generation of man-midwives that flourished in London after the I740s argued vigorously for nature, and for leaving the natural birth process alone. Only when the mother was obviously in trouble did they want to rescue her, and then with the relatively innocuous forceps rather than by destroying the infant. It was the midwives, not the doctors, who continued to interfere with the natural process of birth, by their ceaseless manipulations and dilatations and manual fetchings of the placenta. And because Arney is so obviously clueless about all this, the usefulness of his book is restricted to the only period he knows something about, the years after 1920. This impressive work is the first volume of a study which will embrace the story of military medicine from the earliest times up to the present day. The current volume begins with the literally skeletal evidence of prehistory, and terminates at the eve of the French Revolution. The enterprise has been officially commissioned by the French Comite d'Histoire du Service de Sante, and the editor and author-in-chief, Jean Guillermand, is himself a military doctor of considerable experience, and also, as is evident in this tome, an accomplished historian. The basic research has been assisted by a team of twenty-seven authorities on medicine, history, and archaeology, and not least of Dr Guillermand's achievements has been to rework the material into a well-organized and readable narrative. Guillermand defines …

Book Reviews