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The London Lock Hospital in the Nineteenth Century: Gender, Sexuality and Social Reform by Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (review)

to three paragraphs and makes no attempt to link the story to the rich literature on the Enlightenment coffeehouse. Mullini also makes curious editorial choices. To take but one example, her chapter on the ailments treated by quacks shows that scurvy and venereal disease were far and away the most common diseases mentioned. Why, then, discuss them in a cursory subsection but then spend the rest of the chapter analyzing melancholy, a disease that quacks rarely mentioned? (Mullini’s own data show that quacks mentioned venereal disease—by its many names—ten times more frequently than melancholy.) The upshot of her discussion, predictably that London quacks tended not to trade in melancholy, calls the entire exercise into question. The use of brief subheadings in every chapter and the wandering quality of the book may stem from the lackluster results that her methodology yielded or else from her failure to devise a coherent thesis for the book. The final chapter typifies the problem, offering three case studies: one of a family of quacks, a second about women hawking beauty creams, and finally a look at a pseudo-quack pamphlet penned by the Earl of Rochester. Each is interesting, but they have little to do with one another, and no argumentative thread links them. The publisher, Peter Lang, bears some responsibility. A more thorough peer-review process might have flagged some of the bigger problems. The book may have value for the history of advertising, which for the premodern age has focused more on newspaper advertising in the later eighteenth century. Mullini has coded the archetypical features of seventeenth-century English handbills and supports the picture with empirical data generated by her lexical data analysis. Unfortunately, medical historians familiar with the seventeenthcentury medical marketplace already know about all the advertising strategies discussed here. Readers interested in quacks would better spend their time rereading Porter or going directly to the primary sources themselves. All of the handbills studied by Mullini are available in Early English Books Online. They can be explored by conducting a “Bibliographic Number” search using each collection’s shelf-mark in the British Library: C.112.f.9 and 551.a.32. Not everyone has a subscription to EEBO, so now that Mullini has painstakingly transcribed these wonderful documents, one hopes she might consider making them freely available online.