Jacalyn Duffin's brief but beguiling book (it contains only 127 pages of text, the rest being consumed by notes and bibliography) is a revised version of the Joanne Goodman lectures, which she delivered at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, in 2002. Judging by the sprightliness of her prose, she must have provided an entertaining time for her audience. Along the way, her listeners will have encountered a clever series of arguments for viewing diseases as ideas, and a sometimes passionate dissection of disease and illness, doctor and patient, culture and pathology. At her best, Duffin creates a genuine sense of excitement and engagement with her materials, and these qualities are nowhere more evident than in her concluding chapter on livers (diseases thereof), where she draws fruitfully on her own clinical experience as a haematologist.
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