N.'s book reaches the difficult goal of describing the history of ancient healing techne in antiquity, from its earliest periods until a.d. 620 with Paul of Egina's work, in a way that offers a clear and precise profile of the status quaestionis and cues for reflection and research. This new edition, moreover, includes tests of recent discoveries, especially papyri and manuscripts, and augmented information about Galen, Rufus, Babylonia, Hellenistic medicine and Late Antiquity. Ancient medicine requires, as N. states, caution concerning the assumption of the existence in antiquity of a clearly determined profession of medicine. It is much more about dealing with heterogeneous attitudes, ideologies and practices, not only throughout centuries and places but also in a determined time and space. There was in antiquity neither a single medical system nor ‘a neat distinction between rational and irrational, proper and improper, formal and informal, with the further implication that anything not in the first categories is not medicine or eligible to be studied as a part of the history of medicine’. One of the strengths of N.'s book is to have coherently developed this assumption in a rigorous way, from the opening chapter in which he sets out his scope and sources. N. has a comprehensive approach that is not new, but has led to a revival of interest that ‘has involved co-operation across a wide range of disciplines’ (p. 16). A further difficulty in reconstructing the history of ancient medicine is the fact that, especially in the earliest centuries, knowledge about healing was only transmitted orally from master to disciples. Yet even once the medium of the written form was stabilised, much medical literature was lost or only partially survived in the writings of others, often opponents of those opinions they preserved. N. rightly highlights the fact that the survival of medical texts depended on ‘the continued existence of individuals and institutions both interested in them and in [an] economic position to buy and preserve them’ (p. 4). This is true both for the earlier centuries and for the Imperial period when Galenism triumphed: Galen, in fact, ‘had defined what was genuinely written by Hippocrates and what was not, what was worth studying and what could be left aside, and his decisions were accepted to the point where Galenism and Hippocratism were viewed as identical’ (p. 5). This makes it extremely difficult to trace the story of ancient medicine. Yet for N. it represents an opportunity and a challenge. If medical literature is not available, scholars should turn to non-medical authors and other heterogeneous sources: this methodical use of various sources, literary, epigraphic, papyrological and archaeological, is another strong point of N.'s book. Chapter 2 highlights how difficult is the task of reconstructing the disease profile of antiquity. This task is ‘hampered by the great difference between ancient and modern understanding of the concept of “a disease”’ (p. 28) and consequently ‘our understanding of the reality of illness in the ancient world must remain partial at best’ (p. 35). Chapter 3 aims to reconstruct the story of medicine before Hippocrates. N. examines the mention of healing practices and practitioners within the Homeric poems and this leads him to establish that many remedies known by Homer's time entered the Greek world from Egypt and the Near East before Homer. There is a brief examination of the relationship between medicine and earlier philosophy, however this topic is treated in too cursory a fashion and deserves more attention. The relationship between medicine and philosophy is more carefully treated in Chapter 8 where the focus is especially on Plato, Aristotle and Diocles. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are dedicated to Hippocrates' figure, theories and practice. N. acknowledges the difficulty of stating with certainty which ‘Hippocratic’ texts are really Hippocrates' work and subsequently to trace a more or less probable profile of Hippocrates' thought (about this even the earlier sources like Aristotle and Anonymus Londinensis do not agree). Chapter 7 deals with the relationship between religious and secular healing, focusing above all on the cult of Asclepius, introduced into Athens in 420/419 b.c. However, the definition itself of ‘secular medicine’ is deceptive and can hardly be employed to describe Hippocratic medicine. Chapter 9 throws light on the work of Herophilus and Erasistratus who, for the first time in antiquity, practised dissection and vivisection. Chapter 10 deals with Hellenistic medicine and the rise of pharmacology and surgery to the status of independent parts of medicine (as dietetics was in the fourth century b.c.). The Hellenistic era also saw the idealisation of Hippocrates as a medical authority. In Chapters 11 and 12 N. describes the transfer of Greek Medicine into the Roman world as the pivotal moment in the history of ancient medicine: ‘the assimilation of Greek Medicine into the Latin-speaking world of central Italy, and thence over time into Western Europe, is one of the most momentous developments in the history of medicine … without this development Greek medicine might have remained … an object of historical study. In Latin dress, Greek medical theories continued to be studied, applied, challenged and defended in Western Europe well into the nineteenth century’ (p. 160). Chapters 13 and 14 are about the theories and practices respectively of Methodists and Pneumatists. While the former were members of a medical sect which considered anatomic knowledge irrelevant in everyday medical practice, the latter placed great emphasis on pneuma or spirit as the controlling factor in health and disease. The discussion about Galen's opposition to their medical theories and practices leads into the treatment, in Chapters 15 and 16, of Galen himself, the ‘pivotal figure in the history of Western medicine’, who ‘imposed upon later learned physicians an idea of what medicine was (and, equally important, what it was not) that lasted for more than a millennium’ (p. 222). Chapter 17 attempts to reconstruct a definition of a doctor in the first century. As N. admits, despite the formation of ‘colleges’ or confraternities and Galen's writings about what medicine should or should not be, the predominant feature of the art of healing in this period is the fluidity of all defining boundaries and the ‘medical pluralism, a mixture of many competing types of healing, with a range as broad as the social status of their practitioners and as the variety of doctrines that they held’ (p. 277). In Chapter 18 N., by dealing with the interaction between medicine and religion in the Roman Empire, highlights the complementarity, perhaps emphasised by Christianity, of divine and human healing. The use of epigraphic, archaeological and numismatic sources here is noteworthy. Chapter 19 examines how ‘by ad 650 ancient medicine had taken on the form in which it was to dominate the theory and practice of medicine in the Greek East, and subsequently in the Muslim world and the Latin West, for a Millennium – namely, Galenism’ (p. 299). Chapter 20, by briefly throwing light on the legacy of antiquity in modern Western medicine and by stating, at the same time, the importance of analysing ancient medicine not only as a contribution towards modernity but also in its own right, as N. admirably has done, concludes a valuable book, whose strong points are above all the attention to the diversity of ancient medical practice, to the role and social position of the providers of healing in the ancient world, the reflection on the various attitudes towards disease, and on the relationship and interaction between medicine, religion and magic. N.'s prose is clear, fluid and absorbing.