You are considering whether to buy a product. You look at the reviews. Would the following review decrease or increase the chances of you buying the product?
Review title: Could have been better
Product review: Arikha does a good job with a fascinating subject - an intellectual history of the theory and practice of medicine. As she shows, long-authoritative theories of the four humors profoundly influenced people's lives until only very recently. This makes the book worth buying. With such a good subject, though, it's too bad that Arikha did not take the trouble to do a better job. The book is about twice as long as it should be, and we lose track of the forest in her minute, repetitive descriptions of trees. Moreover, Arikha apparently did not consult very many original sources, and instead mainly presents a re-churning of the secondary literature. Had she better mastered the originals, she might more confidently have been able to tell us what it all means.
