in 1970. Temkin, after a lifetime of research on Galenism, is in a position to differentiate lucidly the man, his medical philosophy, and its influence, the first being elusive, the second an ideal and the third pervasive. His opening chapter delineates the Galenic ideal of the good physician who seeks truth through a fusion of medicine and philosophy, of the contrasting qualities of competition and contemplation, aesthetics and craftsmanship, materialism and teleology. The rest of Temkin's book is an intellectual history of the rise and fall of this program from the patristic philosophers to the seventeenth-century mechanists. In each case, Temkin considers the ability of the Galenic ideal to provode creative medical thought, and his judgments are (appropriately) temperate, avoiding both the Scylla that demands that all science after Descartes be mechanistic and the Charybdis that sees Vesalius only as a humanist reading his Galen. Revisionists of all persuasions can pick at this judgment for some time, but it is a vision that makes sense of the cohesive yet flexible medical system that dominated Western thought for more than fifty generations.