The mid-seventeenth-century physician John Bulwer wrote prolifically and sometimes flamboyantly on subjects as diverse as rhetorical gesture, the passions, sign language for the deaf and dumb, and the cosmetic fashions of different nations. His work on gesture has always held interest for historians of rhetoric, both for its innovations and for its transitional nature: anticipating developments in eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, looking back to the preoccupations of the sixteenth century, and shaped by the profound changes taking place in medical science and psychology during the first half of the seventeenth century. Even for the period of Francis Bacon, William Harvey, and René Descartes, Bulwer's interests in natural philosophy were wide-ranging. In addition to his work on gesture, he published the first theoretical treatise in English on language training for the deaf and dumb; he planned what would have been the first practical academy for such training; and he...