Thomas Laqueur

Primo Levi is among the most read and most resonant witnesses to the greatest human disaster of a disastrous age. He created more powerful images, more mind-sustaining turns of phrase through which to think about these matters than any other writer. The ‘drowned and the saved’, for example: that appallingly stark, Darwinian division between those who managed to secure a few extra...

As Lévi-Strauss might have said, ‘the dead are good to think with.’ But the thoughts they give rise to are seldom as reassuring as one might hope. The dead, and memories of the dead are disruptive, unruly and unpredictable.

For most of its history the United States has been within the mainstream of Western enlightened thought and practice with respect to the death penalty. Sometimes ahead of the curve: Michigan abolished capital punishment in 1846, well before most of Europe; Rhode Island and Wisconsin got rid of it in 1853; North Dakota has never had it; sometimes a bit behind: seven out of nine states that had...

Aids – or, more specifically, the lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and political recriminations that followed the transfusion of whole blood or blood products wittingly or unwittingly tainted with HIV – has renewed our interest in the sanguinary, and Douglas Starr has now set this interest in context. He describes his book as ‘the story of blood – the chronicle of a resource, the researchers who have studied it, the businessmen who have traded it, the doctors who have prescribed it, and the lay people whose lives it has so dramatically affected’. The ‘scandals that killed thousands of haemophiliacs and recipients of transfusions’ form the story’s dénouement. The moral, according to Starr, is that the safe use of this ‘precious, mysterious and hazardous material’ depends on a successful resolution of two sets of questions.’‘

No one should take comfort from the title of Roy Porter’s shaggy masterpiece of a history of medicine. ‘The Greatest Benefit to Mankind’ – the phrase is Dr Johnson’s – begs for a question-mark, a rising inflection of incredulity, if not outright disbelief. Porter is too ebullient, too much of an optimist, too little of a polemicist to supply the Rousseauian rejoinder: ‘An art more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure’. But no one who follows Simon Schama’s advice helpfully prescribed in the blurb – ‘take a dose of the book at least once a day and retire early to bed’ – will sleep easy.’‘