Anita Guerrini, <i>Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR</i> 2nd edn Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 216. ISBN 978-1-4214-4405-5. $28.95 (paperback).

As a teacher-scholar at a primarily undergraduate university, I aim to assign accessible, thought-provoking, and well-researched texts to my students.The second edition of Anita Guerrini's Experimenting with Humans and Animals ably meets these three requirements.She surveys experiments performed in Europe from roughly 350 BCE to the twentieth century and in America from the nineteenth century to the present.In doing so, she asks readers to consider how this long history might inform policy debates over the role of human and animal experimentation in science education and biomedical studies after COVID.This book has many strengths.It discusses some of the triumphs and tragedies of this type of experimental research and provides examples of medical studies performed on prisoners, enslaved peoples and non-human mammals, including dogs and primates.As with the first edition, this book does not shy away from discussing the violence and cruelty inherent in these experiments, especially in the pre-anaesthesia era, but crucially it does not sensationalize this research.Rather, it approaches the subject with care.The first chapter, however, continues to be the book's Achilles heel.This book focuses on 'Western-style science' (p.1), but whether one can categorize premodern studies of the natural world as 'Western' or 'Western-style' is debatable.Beginning in the ancient Mediterranean, Chapter 1, 'Bodies of evidence', recounts the tensions between empirics, who emphasized the importance of observing symptoms when making medical diagnoses, and dogmatists, who stressed the relevance of anatomy to medical practice.It skilfully describes some of the anatomical and physiological studies conducted by Aristotle, Herophilus, Erasistratus and Galen, and concludes with a discussion of medieval Christians' views of animals.It neglects, however, the important contributions of Islamic scholars to the study of anatomy and physiology, as well as their critical role in the translation movement.Arguably, there would be no 'Western science' without their efforts.This concern aside, the next two chapters fast-forward to early modern Europe and explore the role of vivisection in medical research.Chapter 2, 'Animals, machines, and morals', focuses on William Harvey's experiments on the motion of the heart and blood in animals and the so-called Cartesian 'beast-machine' and its moral implications for animal pain and suffering.Chapter 3, 'Disrupting God's plan', examines the history of smallpox inoculations and the burgeoning role of medical statistics in determining the efficacy of inoculations in preventing serious illness and death.This chapter also provides interesting examples of growing public awareness of and concern with vivisection in