White Blood: A History of Human Milk

Abstract

(e.g. pp. 216, 335). However, Lennartson wonderfully translates a couple of reactions that Bergman represented symbolically into modern nomenclature, illustrating, aside from the symbols themselves, how nothing has changed (p. 275). While it is fashionable to be critical of modern publishing, I cannot refrain from comment about the poor, possibly non-existent, copy-editing, which is, of course, not the author’s fault. While the author is clearly very fluent in English, almost every page contains an error of some sort – e.g. “dived” for “divided,” “where” for “were” –while the phrase “Swedish biographers only priced her [Bergman’s wife] for taking good care of her husband” is opaque, though I suppose “prized” or possibly “valued” rather than “priced”might have been intended (pp. 14, 58, 191). Cumulatively, these become very distracting, and the publisher should have employed a native English speaker to read through the text to remove them. On the positive side, the publisher did allow a large number of illustrations, all in colour, including portraits, maps (very useful, though a scale would have been helpful), buildings (including floor plans), apparatus, crystals, manuscripts, book pages, etc. Generally they are clear, though the images of Bergman’s blow-pipe box (p. 326) and of the basalt formations at Billingen (p. 85) are both a bit murky. Also, there is no list of illustrations, which would have been helpful. This seems to be one of the first books to be published in a new series entitled Perspectives on the History of Chemistry, edited by Seth Rasmussen, which “aims to provide volumes that advance the historical knowledge of chemistry and its practice, while also remaining accessible to both scientists and formal historians of science. Volumes should thus be of broad interest to the greater chemical community, while still retaining a high level of historical scholarship” (front matter, n.p.). Though I am not quite sure what “formal” means here, this Plutarchian biography generally meets these criteria and one cannot really ask for more.