This new format was introduced in 1988 with the now familiar Eyewitness
range. The main image and first source of information (or ‘Icon’ if we use
Dorling Kindersley-speak) is floated on a white background surrounded by
supporting notes, which in the lexigraphic code are called Primary Information,
even if the icon is a first source. In the words of its promotional guide,
‘the text helps to slow down pictures as the pictures speed up the words’.
Confused? Never mind, the Supplementary Information will refer you back
to the Icon where it is hoped that the child makes the right connections
about context.

Lexigraphics is undeniably successful in conveying information, but
does it allow a book to entertain as the publisher claims? Well, the trouble
with lexigraphics is that it reduces everything down to single images, nuggets
of information. At times it feels like reading a dictionary instead of Shakespeare’s
plays because all the same words will be there. There has to be more to
spark a child’s imagination. Dorling Kindersley would probably argue that
there are plenty of other publishers to develop a narrative approach but
most of them seem more interested in following the DK lead.

The Visual Dictionary of Dinosaurs is a detailed book using both drawings
and models it would be useful for all ages, which is one of DK’s main strengths.
Certainly it is essential for the committed dinosaur fan, who can now join
DK’s Dinosaur Club and get information from Jac-A-Saurus. Yet for all the
pop marketing this is a sober book.

By contrast, the Usborne Book of Dinosaurs (aimed at the under elevens),
with large Day-Glo dinosaurs and dramatic view-points which give a sense
of scale, is the more lively of the two. An engaging book for younger readers,
it is also a comprehensive guide, if less detailed than DK’s.

Usborne has a track record of producing quality children’s books in
a distinctive style. But DK’s influence can be seen in the way a spread
hinges round one dominant image. More typical of Usborne is Rainforest Wildlife,
a busy, colourful book suitable for a wide age range. Usborne understands
the power of narrative to convey information, and this book has the illustrated
death of a beetle by a trapdoor spider, and a Yanomani Indian story of why
birds have red feathers.

Water and Floating and My First Encyclopedia use a simplified version
of lexigraphics. In the first the claims to encourage investigation in science
feel justified, but My First Encyclopedia is like a cross between a Benetton
and an Early Learning Centre catalogue. While throughout these books, care
has been taken to choose child models of different races and abilities,
sud-denly the encyclopedia gives us a section called children of the world
in which a homogenous Western group appears with little attention given
to real difference. Dull.

Moy McCrory is a writer and critic.

* * *

Visual Dictionary of Dinosaurs Dorling Kindersley, pp 64, £9.99

My First Encyclopedia by Carol Watson, Dorling Kindersley, pp 80, £8.99

Water and Floating, by D. Evans and C. Williams, Dorling Kindersley,
pp 29, £5.99

The Usborne Book of Dinosaurs by Susan Mayes, Usborne, pp 32, £5.95
hbk, £3.95 pbk

Rainforest Wildlife by A. Cunningham, Usborne, pp 32, £5.95 hbk,
£3.95 pbk

In Imagining The Pacific, a splendid book about the imagery brought
back from the Cook expeditions, Bernard Smith reminds us how things are
viewed through a filter of individualism, lest any of his readers still
linger in the wasteland of Victorian overviews where a rigid definition
of the world was held the only reality. Opposed to any form of fundamentalism,
aesthetic or ideological, Smith sketches notes about perception with the
same exigency forced on those artists who accompanied Captain James Cook
on three voyages to the Pacific between 1768 and 1779, where the rigours
of experience affected the nature of their work.

New World explorers had expressed frustration with the inadequacy of
words to convey the extraordinary appearance of landscape. A new role was
emerging for artists, that of the documentary maker who recorded what he
saw. Forced to travel light and work rapidly in situ, the artists developed
a dexterity with pencil and wash drawings. Watercolours gained a prominent
place and value was found in pure line. There was an appreciation of the
artist’s fluency that did not rely on carefully crafted studio methods.
A new respect for drawing emerged.

However, ‘correct’ taste in Europe was determined by classical precedent,
and European minds were not able to understand the Pacific or differentiate
its imagery from any other non-European art. As Smith writes, ‘the exotic
is a fringe dweller among the aesthetic categories’.

The artists who accompanied Cook on these voyages, if able to adapt
their style, had their efforts undermined by the final engravers. A sketch
of a Tahitian village became a scene from Arcadia.

European art trends were inadequate to document the new, but some artists,
notably Willian Hodges and John Webber, did attempt to transform their vision.
Hodges’s real ability is underrated but stands comparison to his contemporary,
Joshua Reynolds. His watercolours show an interest in light which pre-empts
Turner and impressionism, while in Webber were the beginnings of genuine
ethnographical illustration.

It is an irony that the development of secular art, which had begun
to free aesthetic value from religious restraints, should find itself being
turned to quasi religious imagery as in Thomas Moran’s paintings, which
are the basis of Joni Louise Kinsey’s book, Thomas Moran and the Surveying
of the American West.

Moran was an artist who was engaged by American railway companies, (supported
by publishing houses), in their drive to open the west to exploitation.
Working 100 years after Cook’s voyages, Moran accompanied survey teams to
Yellowstone River in 1871, The Grand Canyon (1873) and the Rocky Mountains
(1874).

These surveys were an exploration of the interior of America which at
times took on the tone of national introspection. What is interesting is
the difference in agendas between Moran and Cook’s artists.

Moran’s work was concerned with more than documentation – photography
could achieve that by then. He had to convey deeper messages: notions of
redemption, of healing the wounds inflicted by slavery and the Civil War.
But underlying it all is the belief that he is helping us to view God’s
Own Country. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the study of a cross
of trapped snow in the Rockies (Mountain of the Holy Cross, 1875). See,
He’s even left his trademark.

In response to the painting, the mountain became a place of pilgrimage,
its water bottled by an enterprising company who sold it to those too sick
to manage the ascent. This changeover from the West as a hellish place,
useful to no one, into a haven for nature lovers and a place of spiritual
healing, is a clear example of Moran’s work put to use in manipulating attitudes.

Kinsey’s book is limited in its outlook compared with Smith’s. While
she shows the influence of Turner and John Ruskin on Moran, she omits his
place in the development of American art. While she may show the role played
by Moran’s paintings in the establishment of national parks, she ignores
the issues of exploration. Native Americans are mentioned as a minor inconvenience,
and while Moran may have been working in largely uninhabited regions, his
images of a tourist paradise would be achieved only with the rifles of the
US cavalry.

A hundred years before Moran, the art of exploration was less accomplished,
naive, but not driven solely by profit. There was a humanity the empire
builders that followed would seldom show. The portraits originally sketched
by Hodges of Tu, a tribal king, show an individual possessed of intelligence
and dignity. However, the engraver reduced this image to that of a wild
man. Reworkings of another portrait back in England rendered a Tahitian
man into an orientalist stereotype complete with turban.

If the home-based artists got these images wrong, consider the place
of the indigenous American in Moran’s work, glimpsed only as shadows across
their own vast land.

If the Pacific became in popular imagination a paradise and a place
where civilisation ended, those first portraits, representing people as
individuals, albeit through western eyes, remind us that mutual learning
might have been possible, based on common humanity.

By the time Moran set out west all such understanding had been lost
and it is Cook’s words which echo most prophetically across the continent.
‘ . . . We debauch their morals already too prone to vice and we introduce
among them wants and perhaps disease which they never knew before and which
serves only to disturb that happy tranquillity they and their forefathers
enjoyed. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what
the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they
have had with Europeans.’ Moy McCrory is a writer and lecturer at Goldsmiths’
College, London. She would like to thank Bob Moulder for his invaluable
technical advice on the development of illustration.

If you were unfortunate enough to become ill in the Middle Ages, you
might have fared better as a member of the lower classes, unable to afford
the luxury of medicine and left to the village wise-woman who would mouth
platitudes in return for a boiling fowl.

In Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine Nancy Siraisi looks at the
development of European medicine arising from Arabic sources. As it trundles
through 250 years of history, various ideas are culled. It is interesting
to see what was considered worthwhile and what was dropped as medicine gathered
momentum as a practical science.

Knowledge is power and no less so in the world of diagnosis. The early
disputes were between the philosophers and the jobbers whose knowledge came
from direct experience. As such they were often at odds with the literate
teaching and beliefs of their day. However, staunchly held theories that
suited any number of religious, astrological or numerical reasons were unlikely
to be quickly displaced. It did not matter that Aristotle’s posited three-ventricle
heart could not be displayed in dissection, it was proper theory and as
such would be taught. So was Galen’s theory of the seven-celled uterus,
in which three chambers produced females and three males – while the poor
creature who landed in the seventh cell would be a hermaphrodite.

Medieval jobbers were craftsmen who specialised in a particular operation
– cataract, hernia, gallstone. They were often better than famous surgeons
simply because they got more practice, while specialists in risky procedures
frequently led an itinerant life. I can well imagine why.

I found the book densely worded and had to go back constantly to check
the illustrations, which had good captions, but were in many cases greatly
reduced in size and grainy. This is a shame in an academic book that cites
the errors arising from a hard and fast approach to a science. Like the
early medics, this reader needed to look. Also, as the tone did not vary,
passages risked being buried. When they could be winkled out, I found them
worth the effort. A small aside in a paragraph on dietary regulations, for
example, informs us that lettuce leaves were recommended for toothache while
lettuce seeds were considered useful to cool excessive libido. I will never
view a monastic vegetable garden in the same light after that.

I particularly liked the commonsense treatments which illustrate the
realities of the day. One practitioner’s method to avoid plague was ‘flight
from the area where plague had broken out’.

The chapters deal logically with the conditions of practice, who the
practitioners were, the state of medical education and of available knowledge,
right down to various treatments. However, each chapter ranges across the
three centuries, although Siraisi does not discuss the Renaissance until
the epilogue. There is just so much material here that better editing might
have highlighted. That aside, let us return to the treatments and those
barber-surgeons, splendid fellows who could trim your beard or your spleen
or just indulge in a little healthy bloodletting.

Any attempt at surgery before the comparatively recent development of
pain relief is a tribute to the desire to heal and to the desperation of
those needing a cure. And you would have to be pretty desperate to endure
some of the methods.

By the 14th century, when university training became recognised as the
highest medical education, many practitioners were excluded from formal
study, namely women and Jews so alternative views and practices were, as
today, excluded from mainstream medicine. More disturbingly there was a
narrowing of attitude. Knowledge was in the hands of the few who then moulded
it to their views.

During the Renaissance the changes introduced throughout the 16th century
began to underline the traditional system. Instead of teaching largely accepted
theories, there was a greater emphasis on actual knowledge of the natural
world and of anatomy. But the greatest developments emerged from a context
that was far removed from academic medicine.

As the scope of warfare widened with the use of artillery, battlefield
casualites provided an opportunity for medics to gain experience on an unprecedented
scale. Ambroise Pare, held to be the most accomplished practitioner of his
day, was a 16th-century barber-surgeon who gained his expertise in French
military campaigns. The safest remedy for the ordinary person in the Renaissance
was to join the army, and in medieval Europe the prudent course was to avoid
falling ill, as it is today with health cuts.

Summing up the available knowldege, Siraisi remarks that: ‘Medieval
and early Renaissance Europe did not have an adequate system of health care.’
It is a tragedy that, due to an economic principle, this statement applies
to Britain today. Consider our modern barbarism: doctors having to struggle
for the means to practise, research grants being axed, hospital beds not
available. Don’t be surprised to be asked for an oven-ready chicken in part
payment. We’re getting to that state.

Moy McCrory’s recent novel The Fading Shrine deals with how knowledge
survives.

YOU CANNOT fail to be moved, delighted and, dare I say it, entertained
by Christine El Mahdy’s common sense methods as she debunks the myths about
mummies which arise when people dip into ‘tomb culture’, ignoring historic
and scientific details.

Christine El Mahdy (nee Hobson) has set out to create a work that is
both populist and informative. She has pulled it off without condescension
to bring her specialised knowledge to an ever widening audience who share
a common, but untutored, fascination with Egypt.

She has a sharp yet anecdotal touch. A favourite of mine is the scene
at the excavation of the first royal cache in 1881. So many mummies without
cases were brought out that they were sometimes left in the sun until containers
could be found for them. The mummy of Ramses I lay so long that his wrappings
and resin grew warm, which caused an arm to rise slowly. It created panic
in the ranks.

El Mahdy is a true academic in the way she reviews all sources. Appreciating
that a first interest in this history might have been triggered in a cinema
rather than a museum, she presents us with a still from a 1932 film The
Mummy. We see Boris Karloff as the priest Imhotep, looking strange and lit
from underneath. While the plot is totally inaccurate, the props it seems
are not. Did you know that Karloff’s make up was modelled from the mummy
of Tuthmosis III? Particularly edifying is her treatment of Tutankhamen’s
Curse. The mummy does not stalk British gentlemen beyond the Valley of the
Kings; El Mahdy knows a set up when she sees one.

Such asides are presented as features within the book. Separately titled,
they appear on a different coloured ground (full marks to the designers)
which makes them easy to spot. ‘The Mystery of Lady Teshat’, ‘A Family Tree
of Pharaohs’ and ‘The Unknown Mummy’ all shout for attention. A talented
lecturer, she keeps her audience enthralled with these timely punctuations
that break up great chunks of information.

And giving information is what she is good at. The piece on embalming
is almost a step-by-step guide with helpful graphics. Read it and you begin
to feel as if you were present in the workshop when a new arrival was being
washed out.

But El Mahdy does not write about the mummy as spectacle. She treats
the past with respect and the integrity of the text allows us to imagine
the great, living culture of ancient Egypt. In the mortuary workshops craftspeople
were highly prized, engaged in labour that sacred ritual dignifies.

In the opening chapters she recounts a terrible history of destruction
when the mummy, treated like an inflated currency, had little value in itself
unless it was put to all sorts of further uses. In the Middle Ages, many
people considered powdered mummy had great healing properties and entire
caches were lost to this end. But not only the idly curious or superstitious
caused destruction. Early serious examination of mummies by unrollers also
damaged them.

Beginning with Flinders Petrie’s early X-rays of a mummy’s feet in the
1890s, she describes how the new technology has made available a method
of investigation which does not involve destroying the coffin, mummy or
wrappings. Computer tomographic scanners (CAT scan) give sectional views
of the mummy. Endoscopes allow pathologists to look inside a mummy with
minim damage to the body. Spectroscopy and chromatography can identify elements
through mass and speed.

The smallest details of a mummy, from the type and weave of linen wrappings,
the mode of preservation and the position of the limbs can all provide vital
information in the study of mummification, a fascinating subject, which
is still in its infancy.

She provides clear maps and, bearing in mind the range of history, she
lays out a dynastic table that spans from unification of the Upper and Lower
Kingdoms in 3100 BC until 30 BC when Egypt became a province of the Roman
Empire. The chapters range from the discovery of mummies to how they are
made, to their eventual analysis by archaeologists. A final section provides
the myth and magic of the title. This includes burial rites, the evolution
of the sarcophagus, spells and cults.

A reading list at the end points any reader in the right direction,
while the provision of an inventory is a wonderful touch. In a mummy factfile
she names all the remains in collections throughout the world as a key to
more practical study.

This is a wonderfully comprehensive volume. If you fail to be excited
by it, might I suggest that you are dead? But after reading Mummies Myth
& Magic, I reckon you’d be in good company. Pinch your arm.

Moy McCrory wrote Bleeding Sinners. Her next book, The Fading Shrine,
will be published by Cape this summer.