Hans Bots and Rob Visser (eds), Correspondance, 1785–1787, de Petrus Camper (1722–1789) et son fils Adriaan Gilles Camper (1759–1820), LIAS Sources and Documents Relating to the Early Modern History of Ideas, vol. 28, Amsterdam and Utrecht, APA–Holland University Press, 2002, pp. 304, illus., €50.00 (paperback ISBN 90-302-1098-2, ISSN 0304-0003).

Abstract

The Dutch scientist second only to Boerhaave in international renown in the middle years of the eighteenth century, Petrus (otherwise Peter) Camper was typical of his time in bringing a restless intellectual curiosity to bear on a wide range of different subjects. Primarily a comparative anatomist, he made significant contributions to surgery, obstetrics, and ophthalmology as well. He discovered air spaces in bird bones and studied the hearing of fish and the croaking of frogs, while his measurement of the facial angle and his introduction of Camper's line notably furthered the young discipline of physical anthropology. From pioneer dissections of then little-known mammals, including an elephant and whales, he was later to apply his expertise to the identification of fossil vertebrates. At the same time, Camper was untypical in the privilege he enjoyed from middle life in having the economic option of either continuing in a successful medical career as a university professor and consultant, or of retreating into rural seclusion and comfort to spend his days in private research and writing. It was an option he exercised in favour of the latter twice. He owed it to late marriage to a burgomaster's widow of great wealth, a change in circumstances for which he paid a price in role ambiguity and in a sense of public obligation as a landowner, which ultimately led to high office. He seems to have been temperamentally ill-suited to a political life and retired from it depressed and frustrated. During the two years, 1785–7, leading up to his nomination as President of the Council of State of the United Provinces, Camper conducted an extensive correspondence with his third son, Adriaan, then following his father in a political career and in enjoying a leisurely grand tour which included a lengthy residence in Paris. Two collections of these letters, seventy-one by the father and fifty-one by the son, have survived and are now in the university libraries of Amsterdam and Groningen. Most of them in French but a few in English, they document on a day-by-day basis Adriaan's attempt to interest Georges Buffon in publishing the anatomical discoveries made by his father in his dissections of monkeys and whales. Buffon, by then old and feeble, expressed great admiration of the drawing that had resulted but could not be pinned down to acting in accordance with the father's wishes. In the end the negotiations came to nothing, and another thirty years elapsed before Adriaan saw into print the work on whales (only), long after his father's death. One of the editors of the publication under review, Rob Visser of the University of Utrecht, published in 1985 an authoritative account of Camper's zoological work and was consequently well-placed to realize the value of this correspondence for historians of the life sciences. This value resides most particularly in the light the letters shed on Camper's ways of working and intellectual preoccupations, in how his dissections had led him to view zoology in a very different way from Buffon, despite their shared antipathy to Linnaean method, and in how research on fossils was creating altered perspectives that would serve to shape the emerging discipline of palaeontology. The production of the volume is excellent and the editorial annotation all that one could hope for.