Book Reviews 

Instead of recognizing assimilation policy as the cause of disease, they

prescribed it as the cure.
Racial assumptions were fundamental to the treatment that Native people
received for tuberculosis, the major health concern of Canadians in the
first half of the twentieth century. Here, the self-serving and shameful
behavior of government officials and medical practitioners culminated in
performing medical experiments and drug trials on Aboriginal schoolchild-
ren and adults without their consent.
This book fits neatly alongside studies of other aspects of government
policy, such as treaty-making and residential schools. Its primary contribution
lies in Lux’s insistence that we treat health care as one of the arrows in the
coercive quiver of assimilation policy. As a study of Aboriginal medicine or
Aboriginal response and resistance, this book is less complete. Lux provides
valuable glimpses at Aboriginal medical knowledge, and at the tenacity of its
practitioners and adherents, topics deserving of further investigation.

Jennifer Connor. Guardians of Medical Knowledge: The Genesis of the

Medical Library Association. Lanham, Maryland, The Medical Library Asso-
ciation and The Scarecrow Press, . xi,  pp. $..
Reviewed by Jonathon Erlen, Ph.D., Graduate School of Public
Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania .
The story of the creation and growth of the Medical Library Association
(MLA), originally known as the Association of Medical Librarians (AML)
from  to , provides valuable insight into some of the goals of
North America’s medical elite during the s to the Second World War.
These few eminent medical men had several overriding missions as they
fostered the emergence of America’s first great medical libraries and the
MLA to provide guidance to these institutions. Their first goal was to
facilitate the dissemination of the new medical knowledge being created in
European and American medical laboratories via exchange of new medical
journals and books between medical libraries. Second, these institutions
would play an active role in helping improve the quality of North American
medical education. Finally, these medical libraries, through their bookish
image and their promotion of history of medicine scholarship, would im-
prove the public image of North American physicians.

Angela N. H. Creager. The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an

Experimental Model, –. Chicago, Illinois, University of Chicago
Press, . xiv,  pp. illus. $. (cloth), $. (paper).
Reviewed by William C. Summers, M.D., Ph.D., Department of
Therapeutic Radiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Ha-
ven, Connecticut .
 Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January 
Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), the agent that causes mottled lesions on
the leaves of tobacco and certain other plants, is one of the earliest recognized
examples of what are now called “filterable viruses” or simply “viruses.”
Since the late nineteenth century, the nature of this agent has fascinated
biologists, chemists, and even physicists. Because, in general, knowledge
about a particular organism fuels further interest in that organism, TMV
became established as a “model virus.” What was true for TMV became
true for all viruses.
The Life of a Virus explores the research in the mid-twentieth century
that firmly established TMV as a crucial experimental model for understand-
ing viruses, per se, as well as for the approaches and paradigms of the
new field of molecular biology. Centered on the work of Wendell Stanley
and his colleagues, this history shows how research on TMV as a representa-
tive virus answered questions about the nature of viruses in general, the
origins of life, and the genetic code. As biological knowledge grew, TMV
kept up with the times. New technology and new biological knowledge
were interdependent. Both ultracentrifugation and electron microscopy
were crucial methodologies that contributed to TMV research and, at the
same time, were validated by it. At every turn, TMV proved its worth:
from its purification and crystallization in the s to its dissociation
into protein and nucleic acid components, followed by reconstitution of
infectious virus in the s, to its use in the s linking changes in its
RNA to changes in its protein coat, thus establishing the principle of a
genetic code.
Angela N. H. Creager, a biological chemist turned historian of science,
lays out this history to emphasize model systems (a system includes a
specific organism together with a collection of experimental procedures and
fundamental assumptions) as exemplars of scientific activity. Her approach
exposes the connections that link biomedical, agricultural and fundamental
research communities and the web of interactions that occurred in the day-
to-day laboratory work on TMV. This book provides a compelling historical
analysis that encompasses the diversity and messiness of actual scientific
research, a perspective that I am tempted to attribute to the author’s experi-
ence of having “been there and done that.” She avoids the seductive attrac-
tions of “high theory” that often seems to force-fit historical evidence into
normative, predetermined categories. Instead, Creager provides a balanced
and detailed account of the complex network of research on TMV inter-
woven with the social and administrative contexts of mid-twentieth century
biomedical science. Life of a Virus is a valuable addition to the growing
scholarship aimed at a critical and nuanced analysis of the origins, growth,
and development of molecular biology.