As John Cunningham makes clear in his nuanced introduction to this useful collection, scholarship on the history of medicine in early modern Ireland has struggled to keep pace with the acceleration in interest in the subject in the early modern period generally. If, as the editor reasonably contends, this can be attributed in substantial part to the loss of ‘court, corporation and guild records’ when the Public Record Office of Ireland was ‘blown up during the Irish Civil war in June 1922’ (p. 6), it is necessary also to acknowledge that this was a time of major transition as the disruptive register of the new approaches to care advocated by Paracelsus, Jan Baptist van Helmont, Thomas Sydenham and Herman Boerhaave was compounded by major political changes bound up with the anglicisation process promoted by the Crown. One consequence of this was the undoing of the network of medical schools that were integral to the system of medicine that obtained in pre-conquest Gaelic Ireland. Furthermore, though it is apparent that the influx of New English settlers during the sixteenth century augmented the availability of medical knowledge in the island’s main urban centres, they did so in an ad hoc and essentially unstructured manner. The implication that the reconstruction of ‘the world of medicine’ in the early modern period will require the collective energies of a diversity of scholars is unescapable. But it is pleasing to note, in that context, that the volume under review, which ‘encompasses a variety of different approaches and emphases, focussed at different points across a period of more than two centuries’ (p. 7) represents a good start and that students interested in the subject will profit from perusing its pages.