Siraisi deftly guides the reader with engaging and descriptive prose toward her modest theses... It is a welcome introduction to the world of medical epistles in the Renaissance.
Joel A. Klein Early Science and Medicine This book goes a step further in the current critical reassessment of the minor genres of early modern medical literature, traditionally viewed as secondary ... Read moresources. Mastering Renaissance history and historiography, Siraisi shows how they can be used to access the world of sixteenth-century medical practitioners avoiding artificial distinctions between the social and intellectual motives underpinning their multifold activities.
Maria Pia Donato American Historical Review These studies will be useful to anyone exploring the development of espistolae midicinales. Siraisi also offers valuable evidence of the establishment of an eraly medical Republic of Letters.
Niall Hodson Centaurus Communities of Learned Experience puts the theme of networks center stage, making useful connections to current research on communities of knowledge and republics of letters both humanistic and scientific even as it contributes more particularly to the history of medicine... In 87 pages, [Siraisi] offers a distillation of the encyclopedic learning, rigorously forensic analysis, elegant argumentation, and wry humor that are the hallmarks of her career... This book is an expert introduction to the world of early modern medical inquiry... For its wealth of information and important call for more attention to medical epistles, Communities of Learned Experience takes a more than worthy place in Siraisi's oeuvre and should occupy an important space in the history of science section of early modernist's collections.
Sarah Gwenyth Ross Aestimatio: Critical Reviews in the History of Science [Communities of Learned Experience] reflects Siraisi's routinely thorough research and engaging prose, and it would be difficult to argue that the book does not accomplish what it sets out to do.
Fred Gibbs British Journal for the History of Science What trajectory can be charted through physicians' letters? Siraisi's elegant and economical book has give her readers a useful and pleasurable roadmap that helps to explain how learned physicians indeed created a world of their own making in print during the age of Vesalius.
Paul Findlen Bulletin of the History of Medicine Siraisi's work on epistolary medicine will be of interest not only to those studying Renaissance medicine, but will also provide a useful backdrop to those studying the topic in the early modern period. It will appeal to historians of the Republic of Letters and the humanist movement who may not have given consideration to the correspondence of physicians of the period.
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