| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

L. W. B. Brockliss. Calvet's Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France. New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 471.
This is an impressive, scrupulously researched study of a provincial doctor and scholar whose interests and intellectual contacts are taken to be typical of the Republic of Letters of his time, and so of the Enlightenment.	1
Esprit Calvet (1728–1810) was born and lived most of his life in Avignon. The only child of a comfortably retired apothecary, Calvet received his secondary education from the Jesuits, then studied medicine in Avignon and Paris. He returned to Avignon, where he was received into the corporation of doctors and taught in the Faculty of Medicine of the city for fifteen years. Having rejected the iatrochemistry prevalent when he was a student, his medical views were those of Hermann Boerhaave's iatromechanism, but he never accepted the vitalist theories that gained ground later in the century. Interestingly, Calvet, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, came to doubt the efficacy of contemporary therapeutics and to believe that the best a doctor could do was not to interfere with the course of nature (p. 151). This did not prevent him from prescribing the kinds of cures and medicines his clients expected, and for which they paid handsomely (pp. 180–81). In addition to maintaining a lucrative practice, Calvet treated the poor in the hôpital, acted as a local agent for the Paris Royal Society of Medicine, of which he was a corresponding member, and did work for the local authorities on health questions.	. . .

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