Alexander G. Bearn, Archibald Garrod and the Individuality of Man . Oxford, Clarendon Press 1993. Pp. xvi+227, £20. ISBN 0-19-2621459 Archibald Garrod was born in 1857, two years before Darwin’s Origin of Species and eight years before Mendel published his paper on the patterns of inheritance of dominant and recessive characters. Garrod was the fourth son in a family of six clever children. His father was a distinguished physician who believed in using scientific methods in clinical medicine and had identified uric acid in the blood of patients of gout. The young Archibald became interested in science at school; after a year reading chemistry at University College London he went to Oxford and gained a 1st class in Natural Science in 1880. He then decided to follow his father’s profession and qualified in medicine at Barts in 1884.