| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 131.2

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 131.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Dr. Franklin's Medicine. By Stanley Finger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. xiii, 379 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $39.95.)
Kudos to Stanley Finger and to the University of Pennsylvania Press—they have produced an attractive, readable, and well-researched account of Benjamin Franklin and medicine. The text is comprehensive, the endnotes are clear, the index is usable, and the illustrations are generous in number. Because Franklin is of tremendous interest to general readers, this volume would be a clever way to introduce eighteenth-century medicine to people who will follow the Franklin name into subjects they might not otherwise read about. For that reason, as well, the book would be a welcome addition to undergraduate courses on the history of medicine.	1
The book surveys, in roughly chronological order, the major topics in medicine that interested Franklin. These included inoculation against smallpox, the value of hospitals, medical uses for electricity, lead poisoning, medical self-help guides, gout, medical quackery (featuring Mesmerism), bifocals, and the education of doctors. Franklin's range of interests was astonishing and Finger seems to have identified nearly all of them.	. . .

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