The Book of Madness and Cures in Around the World in 80 Books

Jul 02, 2013 Julie Griffin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads

I like to read books that are entertaining (first!) but also allow me to feel like I have learned something about a culture, nation, history, or some other thing or place when I am finished. This book both entertained me with its story of a road trip through 1500s Europe and its very interesting details of the practice of medicine at the time. Dottore Mondini is a respected doctor in Venice, Italy, and unusually for the time, a woman. She loses her right to practice, however, when the Guild fina I like to read books that are entertaining (first!) but also allow me to feel like I have learned something about a culture, nation, history, or some other thing or place when I am finished. This book both entertained me with its story of a road trip through 1500s Europe and its very interesting details of the practice of medicine at the time. Dottore Mondini is a respected doctor in Venice, Italy, and unusually for the time, a woman. She loses her right to practice, however, when the Guild finally pulls its support ten years after her father and mentor disappeared mysteriously to travel the world in search of.... well, his daughter is not quite sure, nor is the reader. The book details Gabriella's long journey in search of her father, to reinstate herself as a doctor as well as to find out what has happened to her father and why he has not returned to her and her mother after ten years. Gabriella, at almost 30 giving her mother despair over any lingering wishes that she will marry and have children, sets off determinedly with her longtime servant, Olmina, and Olmina's husband, Lorenzo. As she travels, she carries her medicine chest and we see how practitioners healed illnesses and injuries. Gabriella gets more desperate as they travel through a town which has exiled or killed all its women due to an overeager priest, sails from The Netherlands through a rough North Sea to Edinburgh, climbs through the Dolomites and the Appenines, and finally lands in the Middle East. Along the way, she loses some valuable companions and falls in love and other surprises happen. The details of travel in these times is fascinating and well researched. Gabriella also continues to take notes on maladies for the book she has begun notating for her father, on diseases and cures, and the diseases sometimes stretch the imagination---black tears, girls who turn into trees or hairy animals---some a way to describe mental illnesses for which no information could be obtained back in those times. Gabriella finally discovers what she is looking for. The last of the book is the weakest part--I would have liked to have it more detailed and lengthy. Regina O'Melveny is a poet and at times her poetic eye lends beauty to her prose, especially in descriptions of landscapes, both of the land and of the mind. A great book for anyone interested in history, medicine, or just a good journey. ...more

Like · see review