A Social History of Medicine: Health, Healing and Disease in England, 1750-1950 (review)

Joan Lane. A Social History of Medicine: Health, Healing and Disease in England, 1750-1950.London: Routledge, 2001. ix + 233 pp. Ill. $80.00 (cloth, 0-415-20037-7), $27.95 (paperbound, 0-415-20038-5).

Joan Lane, I believe, saw a published copy of her book before her untimely death. I hope she was pleased, for she had almost every reason to be so. The title does not give away the novelty of this volume: at first sight it appears to be yet another history of English medicine, starting with the Enlightenment and ending with Aneurin Bevan. Do we not have enough of such volumes already? Lane, however, has taken an approach, whose simplicity has previously hidden it from plain sight: eschewing an overall chronology, she has treated her subject thematically. Eleven chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion deal with such familiar things as "Medical Care under the Old and New Poor Law," "Hospitals and Dispensaries," and "Midwifery and Nursing"—but less immediately obvious categories for such a book are also used, such as "The Pharmaceutical Industry" and "Medicine and War." Within each chapter, of course, a temporal framework is employed.

Those who know Lane's work will be familiar with a scholar who was an indefatigable archive-miner, particularly of gold mines in the West Midlands of England. She was an especially important contributor to the literature on the doctor-patient relationship and on apprenticeship, illuminating the details of everyday life in a country practice in the eighteenth century and the travails of aspiring practitioners. This fund of local knowledge forms the bedrock for the best chapters and parts of chapters in this book, which are centered on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The twentieth-century sections lack the same sort of substance. There are a number of odd and misleading assertions. Nonetheless, chapters such as "Medical Care Provided by Friendly Societies" provide such unsurpassed, succinct, unknown, and rich teaching material that anyone preparing a course on the history of English medicine should feel bound to give this work more than a first look.