Klaas van Berkel and Bart Ramakers (eds), Petrus Camper in Context. Science, the Arts, and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic (Hilversum: Verloren, 2015), 316pp., ill. ISBN: 9789087044671

This chapter reviews the book Petrus Camper in Context. Science, the Arts, and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic (2015), edited by Klaas van Berkel and Bart Ramakers. The book focuses on the social standing of the Dutch professor of medicine Petrus Camper (1722–1789), and particularly his political role and his artistic ideas and accomplishments. It presents an interesting case of the role of science and medicine in the period of the Enlightenment. There are papers on Camper as a landowner and Frisian politician; on his connections to other intellectuals of his time; on his impact on the university of Groningen, where he taught for several years; and on his illustrations for William Smellie’s anatomical atlas. Camper’s scholarly work should be seen in the larger framework of his social responsibilities and the new ideal of citizenship as it emerged in the period of the Enlightenment.