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Poison became not just a malicious substance, it became a cause for disease itself, an idea that only expanded in the early modern period. Gibbs argues that these various nascent ideas of poison as a harmful substance and disease agent came into their full theoretical expression in the fifteenth century, which he portrays as the ‘culmination of medieval toxicology’ (p. 151). Two early fifteenth-century Italian physicians, Antonio Guaineri and Sante Arduino, solidified the ontological status of poison and the role of ‘total substance’ in their influential treatises. Gibbs thus calls attention to the significant originality in fifteenth-century medicine, an oft-neglected era. This fifteenth-century scholarship provided the basis for new ideas about disease causation in the sixteenth century. The longstanding and widespread connection between poison and disease, Gibbs argues, puts the famous poison theories put forth by the Swiss medical rebel Paracelsus into perspective. The idea often attributed to Paracelsus that ‘the dose makes the poison’ had long been a common understanding, and Paracelsus actually emphasised dosage far less than his concept of a poisonous and a healing part in every substance. At the same time, Paracelsus shifted existing concepts of poison, especially in his focus on the inability of the body to absorb poison rather than the harmful nature of venenum. In varying ways, sixteenth-century physicians put poison at the centre of their disease ontologies. Poison became a common explanation for the French Disease, or syphilis, and French physician Jean Fernel put the ‘total substance’ of poison at the root of nearly all infectious diseases. In the second half of the sixteenth century, attempts to reconcile the (often divergent) classical and medieval traditions of venenum prompted physicians to focus on the specific effects of specific poisons on the body. Gibbs suggests that this effort should be considered more fully in the overall history of toxicology. Poison, Medicine and Disease is thorough and convincing. Gibbs has consulted well over 200 ancient, medieval and early modern treatises on poison, and he has woven together a clear and coherent trajectory of the status of poison from the ancient world to the early modern period. He demonstrates both the importance of poison to the history of disease ontologies and the centrality of medicine to the history of toxicology. The work can be a heavy theoretical lift at times and thus may be more of interest to the scholar than the general reader, but Gibbs explains the difficult concepts in his texts clearly. His book should be a standard reference work for anyone interested in the history of poison.