"Colombo, Realdo: De re anatomica libri XV. Anatomia. Edizione, traduzione e commento diretti da Gianluigi Baldo. Redazione, bibliografia e indici a cura di Tiziana Brolli. Paris, Belles Lettres, 2014. cxvi+886 p. (coll. Sciences et Savoirs). € 225.–. ISBN 978-2-251-22002-4." published on 06 Nov 2016 by Brill.

"Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century. Edited by David Cantor and Edmund Ramsden. Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2014. 367 p. $ 125.–. ISBN 978-1-58046-476-5" published on 06 Nov 2016 by Brill.

"Mercer, Alexander: Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition. A New Perspective. Rochester NY, University of Rochester Press, 2014. 352 p. Ill. £ 80.–. ISBN 978-1-58046-508-3 (e-book available)" published on 06 Nov 2016 by Brill.

"Osborne, Michael A.: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 328 p. Ill. $ 50.–. ISBN 978-02-2611-4521 (e-book: 978-02-2611-4668)" published on 06 Nov 2016 by Brill.

Conrad Gessner's Historia animalium is a compilation of information from a variety of sources: friends, correspondents, books, broadsides, drawings, as well as his own experience. The recent discovery of a cache of drawings at Amsterdam originally belonging to Gessner has added a new dimension for research into the role of images in Gessner's study of nature. In this paper, we examine the drawings that were the basis of the images in the volume of fishes. We uncovered several cases where there were multiple copies of the same drawing of a fish (rather than multiple drawings of the samefish), which problematizes the notion of unique "original" copies and their copies. While we still know very little about the actual mechanism of, or people involved in, commissioning or generating copies of drawings, their very existence suggests that the images functioned as an important medium in the circulation of knowledge in the early modern period.

"Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire. Edited by John Slater, Maríaluz López-Terrada, and José Pardo-Tomás. Farnham; Burlington, Ashgate, 2014. xvi+309 p. Ill. (New Hispanism. Cultural and Literary Studies). £ 70.–. ISBN 978-1-4724-2815-8 (e-book: 978-1-4724-2815-8)" published on 06 Nov 2016 by Brill.

Ornithology has emerged as a science at the turn of the 18th century. To become a self-sufficient scientific discipline, studies of birds had to distinguish themselves from luxury, trade and poetry. Scholars had to invent new ways of writing, different from the beautiful and ornamented books on birds, even if these books were often published by other scholars who had been expelled from academic institutions and therefore considered as «amateurs». The same scholars needed the help of «amateurs» in order to observe and explain bird migration. First ornithological discourses in Europe and the United States illustrate the relationships between scholars, authors and «amateurs» and show how these words can be used in different meanings.

This article traces the unusual astronomical career of Jean Chacornac (1823–1873) during the French Second Empire. This clerk in a bazaar in Marseille became in just a few years astronomer at the Paris imperial observatory, and was then brutally expelled from this prestigious institution. The «Chacornac affair», largely forgotten, was an asymmetric struggle between a self-taught astronomer and the most famous professional French astronomer of the time, Urbain Le Verrier. Through the study of this case, we want to shed a light on people and practices kept on the margins of science by the process of professionalization of astronomy. Although he was excluded from the institution, Chacornac tried to continue to be an astronomer, independently, «from below». But the construction of a new social identity for State astronomy, in particular by Le Verrier, was inseparable from the attribution of indelible social stigma, which made Chacornac an «obligatory amateur».

"Boudon-Millot, Véronique: Galien de Pergame. Un médecin grec à Rome. Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2012. 416 p. (Histoire, vol. 117). I 29.–. ISBN 978-2-251-38117-6 Mattern, Susan P.: The Prince of Medicine. Galen in the Roman Empire. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013. xxio334 p. Ill. £ 20.–. ISBN 978-0-19-960545-3/Medicina nei secoli. Arte e scienza. N.s., vol. 25, no 3, 2013. Roma, Centro Stampa Università, 2013. 500 p. I 22.66. ISSN 0394-9001" published on 11 Nov 2015 by Brill.