“... this time. Hints had appeared in print, in the loquacious pamphlets of Robert Greene and Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, but more damagingly precise were the reports of Government informers – a flourishing trade in the police-state atmosphere of late Elizabethan London. There are two key documents, generally referred to as the ‘Baines Note’ and the ...”

“... when discoveries if not cures begin to pile up at an increasing pace. In the age of Vesalius and Harvey, modernity and medicine begin their strange, ambiguously successful, pas de deux, as the body is mapped in ever finer detail, its deepest secrets are brought to light, and its ailments are chronicled, ameliorated and on occasion even conquered. Porter’s ...”