Like its sequel, Crucial Interventions, the Sick Rose is a beautifully made book showcasing wonderful 19th century illustrations of a macabre topic - diseases, in this case. The printing is crisp, and the book's layout puts the artwork first and foremost. It's a joy to look through, even though the subject matter is far from joyous.

The introduction is a concise history of western medicine, anatomy, and medical illustration. The following chapters, each about a type of disease, describe the early modern history of the illness and its treatment. Having read Crucial Interventions first and expecting a similar disconnect between the text and artwork, I was pleasantly surprised to see the text more closely related to the visuals, and even more so at the fact that the captions for a few of the illustrations went into some detail about the specific case shown.

The book is let down somewhat by spotty citation, and the fact that the index of illustrations is ordered alphabetically by the authors' names rather than by the page number in the book, making it time-consuming to find the credits for a specific illustration.

For artists and writers working with a 19th century setting, I think this should be a good source of inspiration. Illness was everywhere in this era, and while fiction of and about the period often references tuberculosis, gout, and cholera, there was so much more that we might not think of, or dismiss as not visually noticeable. The Sick Rose will expand your visual vocabulary.