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gradually developed into an interest in the production
and trade of brandy.
Distilled spirits intended for transport and sale were
little known anywhere in Europe prior to 1600. Cullen
demonstrates that the distillation of brandy from
grapes-as opposed to spirits produced from grains or
sugar-was largely a hit-or-miss empirical process
through the seventeenth century. Distillers pursued
their experimentation with hydrometers and other
tools of the trade, while merchants developed wider
trading networks with customers in the Baltic, England, and Ireland.
Much of the first half of this work will prove heavy
going for some readers. Cullen authoritatively describes in minute detail the improvements in distilling
methods and the varying qualities of the finished
product. This book therefore is now the best source for
anyone who needs to know the difference between
brandy coupee a la serpentine, champagne brandy, Fins
Bois brandy, spirit "one-third," spirit "three-fifths,"
and so on. The glossary of terms that comes at the start
of the volume further underscores its utility as a
reference work.
By the early eighteenth century, the production and
sale of different qualities of brandy had become a
highly sophisticated operation in the Charente region.
Cullen notes that consumers abroad and within France
had developed discriminating palates for particular
colors, tastes, and levels of alcoholic content. The
drive to determine the exact quality of each batch of
brandy was also encouraged by the fiscal needs of the
state. The French government and customs officials in
other countries wanted accurate determinations in
these matters so that higher taxes could be imposed on
the better grades.
By the early 1700s, the brandy trade was launched
on a growth curve that would continue, with a few
temporary downturns, through the century. By midcentury, the Irish and northern European markets
were declining, partly a result of competition from
grain-based spirits (especially gin) and from Spanish
brandies. But the English market remained relatively
steady, and the Paris market increased rapidly.
Cullen's research is impressive, his writing is clear,
and his conclusions appear sound. I wish, however,
that Cullen had added a few pages to this modest-sized
volume in order to relate the findings regarding brandy
to other aspects of Old Regime life. For example,
Cullen sees the last decades of the seventeenth century
and first decades of the eighteenth as a take-off point
for brandy production and export. He could make this
finding more important by noting how it supports other
recent authors who have argued that the economy of
France at the end of the reign of Louis XIV was more
dynamic than was thought by earlier generations of
scholars. Cullen traces the growth of this viticultural
industry through the eighteenth century, and yet he
says nothing about how this dovetails with what other
authors have said about the French economy as a
whole or about wine trade in that period. Cullen notes
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
that the merchant houses that dominated the brandy
trade tended to be Huguenot families or foreigners.
The latter included, most famously, Jean Martell from
the Channel Islands and Richard Hennessy from Ireland. Yet this book does not attempt to relate their
stories to what other historians have said about Protestants or foreigners in eighteenth-century France.
Finally, Cullen persuasively delineates the growing
prosperity and complexity of all areas of brandy production and trade. However, without some comparisons to other areas of commerce (for example, Steven
L. Kaplan's several books on the grain trade and
breadmaking), one cannot have a good grasp of just
how well developed the brandy trade was.
Admittedly, to raise these questions is to risk asking
Cullen to write a book that he did not intend to write.
Economic historians of the Old Regime can be grateful for what he has produced: a finely crafted monograph on an important topic.
THOMAS
J. SCHAEPER
St. Bonaventure University
FREDERIC LAWRENCE HOLMES. Antoine Lavoisier-The
Next Crucial Year, or The Sources of His Quantitative
Method in Chemistry. Princeton: Princeton University
Press. 1998. Pp. vii, 184. $35.00.
In this short, lively, and illuminating interpretation of
Antoine Lavoisier's experimental work in 1773, Frederic Lawrence Holmes engages specific issues in
Lavoisier studies as well as broader issues on writing
the history of science.
The title of the book rightly suggests a starting point
in Henry Guerlac's well-known book, Lavoisier-The
Crucial Year: The Background and Origins of His First
Experiments on Combustion in 1772 (1961). In an
analysis that remains part of the mainstream of studies
of the "Chemical Revolution," Guerlac traced the
origins of Lavoisier's interest in chemical combustion
to the year 1772, noting the importance of Lavoisier's
experiments on phosphorus and sulfur for his later
theory of oxidation and his reconstruction of the
system of chemistry.
Using Lavoisier'S laboratory notebooks and other
sources, Holmes takes up Lavoisier's experimental
path from October 1772 to January 1774, bringing the
reader to grips with Lavoisier's work and, insofar as
possible, his intentions and speculations. What results
is a finely honed and finely structured account of the
ups and downs of what Holmes calls the "investigative
pathway" of the scientist. Especially striking (and
consistent with other historical accounts) is Holmes's
depiction of the great ambitions of the youthful
Lavoisier as he aimed to advance both chemical science and his own reputation within the forums of the
Paris Academy of Sciences and the broader scientific
community.
Yet, as Lavoisier embarked upon a course in October 1772 to demonstrate that the chemical processes of
calcination and reduction require not a principle of
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"phlogiston" but the absorption and release of an
identifiable elastic fluid (gas), he met one obstacle
after another. His laboratory equipment leaked or
collapsed, the products of his chemical operations
were not what he expected, the results of his calculations turned out to be inconsistent with his assumptions, and he found himself ill-prepared for Academy
meetings, so that he exaggerated in public the character and certainty of what he had been able to demonstrate to himself in private. As a consequence, Lavoisier's bold hopes that his research would bring about a
revolution became transformed by late 1773 into the
more humble claim that his recent studies of elastic
fluids contributed importantly to the ongoing revolution in chemistry begun by Stephen Hales, Joseph
Black, and their successors.
Even as Lavoisier was failing to prove correct his
particular theory of combustion during the course of
1773, however, he was inventing a quantitative style of
chemical experimentation that was to become known
as the "balance-sheet" method of studying chemical
reactions. While other chemists had loosely employed
the assumption of the conservation of matter,
Lavoisier came to apply it precisely in calculating the
weights of chemical substances, including the elastic
fluids. In doing so, he developed a repertoire of
apparatus and related procedures that were far superior to those with which he began.
Holmes's account demonstrates how Lavoisier's scientific creativity and originality were rooted in ingenious and inventive responses to the obstacles, accidents, and setbacks that he faced in the early days of
his chemical investigations. This brief and engaging
study makes superb use of surviving laboratory notebooks in order to follow the scientist's "investigative
pathway," a methodology that Holmes has applied
elsewhere in larger and more detailed studies of
Claude Bernard, Hans Krebs, and Lavoisier. As
Holmes argues in his conclusion, the laboratory notebook provides a record of the private science that is
fundamental and complementary to the public science
found in the published article or the public forum. This
is a book that should be read by historians, scientists,
and students for insights both into scicntific practice
and the historian's craft.
MARY Jo NYE
Oregon State University
JACALYN DUFFIN. To See with a Better Eye: A Life of
R. T H. Laennec. Princeton: Princeton University
Press. 1998. Pp. xvii, 453. $49.50.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the medicine
practiced in Paris played a nodal role in the larger
transition from traditional to modern medicine. The
emergence of the hospital as the central locus of the
diagnosis and care of patients, as well as for the
training of future practitioners; the origins of pathological anatomy as an essential tool of diagnosis and
the explanation of disease; the unification of medicine
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
and surgery; the birth of an "empirical" method for the
evaluation of therapy; the emergence of an experimental physiology rooted in the reform of surgery but
eventually challenging the supremacy of bedside experience: all have been attached historically to developments that occurred in Paris during this intense epoch
in French history. Paris medicine also provided the
model for change in other European countries, Great
Britain, and the United States.
Following the appearance of Erwin Ackerknecht's
compact yet vivid overview of Medicine at the Paris
Hospital: 1794-1848 (1967), the subject of Paris medicine has been a favorite topic for historians of medicine. Michel Foucault's Naissance de fa clinique [Birth
of the Clinic] (1963) portrayed the emergence of
clinical medicine in Paris as a prototypical example of
what Foucault afterward defined as an "epistemic
rupture." Since then, historians have both challenged
and extended the interpretations of Ackerknecht and
Foucault, exploring various aspects of science and
medicine in nineteenth-century France that have had
major impact on the emergence of the "scientific"
medicine of the later nineteenth and twentieth-century
world.
No single individual played a more central role in
what made Paris the leading center for these developments than R. T. H. Laennec (known to his family as
Theophile), the inventor of the stethoscope and one of
the leading proponents of the methods of pathological
anatomy for which Paris became renowned. As George
Weisz has shown, the historical image of Laennec
changed dramatically over the course of the nineteenth
century. At first acknowledged somewhat grudgingly,
in part because his royalist sympathies were unpopular
in the generation after his death in 1826, Laennec grew
to a figure of mythical dimensions later in the century.
To some historians then and now, his stethoscopc and
its more refined descendants have come to symbolize
the break between an older medicine based on the
individuality of the patient, with treatment based on
close attention to subjective symptoms, and a modern
medicine based on the physical examination, technology, and an objective knowledge of disease not directly
accessible to the patient.
Jacalyn Duffin's book is a highly successful effort to
rescue from these legendary overlays the historical life
and personality of Laennec that can be retrieved from
the rich archival resources-including personal correspondence, manuscripts, and hospital records-that
trace his family life, his medical practice, and his
innovations. Duffin has aimed to reintroduce the biographical dimension into a historiography that has
recently focused more on the social aspects of Paris
medicine than on the individuals who played prominent parts in its development.
In these pages, Laennec gradually comes alive as a
complex personality, formed by the convoluted circumstances of his Breton family background. Ambitious
and talented, only fitfully supported by an eccentric
father, Laennec made his way in Paris through the
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