The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500-2000 (review)

This Festschrift celebrates the work of Charles Webster, one of the outstanding medical historians of the past forty years. Webster ranges widely (I use the present tense as he is still active) from Paracelsus to the English Civil War reformers of science and medicine to the twentieth-century English National Health Service. His historical skills are eclectic and in combination formidable. Although he might not want to admit it, given the early fights in the late 1960s and in the 1970s against "internalist" or intellectual history, he has a great grasp of concepts and often focuses on the intellectual/philosophical background to medicine, on the social and political theories underlying change, and on the content of medicine.

In addition to his conceptual skills, Webster also deploys the traditional armamentarium of the Oxford historian: one fact after another, together with listings of names, to build up a case or establish a prosopographical picture. Politically, he takes a broadly left-wing approach; hence the ever-present interest in reform. As to sociological theory, neither he nor his students, fortunately or, perhaps, unfortunately, have done anything to throw doubt on Karl Mannheim's observation that in England there was a "hatred of theory."¹

The different chapters in this book echo many of Webster's interests and approaches. Howard Hobson's chapter, "The Instauration of the Image of God, in Man," traces how the doctrine of theosis influenced the young Comenius, who was the inspiration for many of the actors in Webster's The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (1976). Intellectually, this is the highlight of the book. Chapters on Paracelsianism and music, on magic as seen economically in early modern England, and on the relationship between chemical medicine and Paracelsianism in early modern Italy will interest early modernists as they foreground topics that have often been ignored. Margaret Pelling, who has been one of Webster's closest collaborators, looks at the links among politics, medicine, and masculinity from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. She shows by an exhaustive trawl through the records that only a few doctors played a role in the public life of the country, whether in the cursus honorum of towns or as MPs. This absence, she argues, entailed a loss of masculine authority. It may have been so in a nominalist sense, but no evidence is presented as to whether it actually affected the perceptions of doctors.

Chapters on faith healing and Henry More, on the politics surrounding the hanging and self-revival of Anne Green, and on the anatomical and ambassadorial career of John Finch in Italy between 1649 and 1671, though very disparate in subject, succeed in transporting the reader into worlds where philosophy, politics, and medicine came together. Mordechai Feingold, in an important chapter, shows how the prehistory of the Royal Society has been unduly influenced by John Wallis's accounts. These emphasized that London rather than Oxford was the place that gave birth to the society. Feingold makes a convincing case for reinstating Sprat's account, denigrated by Wallis, that in Oxford lay the origin of the Royal Society. Finally, to end the early modern strand of the book, Jonathan Barry shows that Puritanism, or rather militant Protestantism, had a long afterlife in his study of John Cary and Cary's plans for poor relief in Bristol.

The eighteenth century gets short shrift, and this perhaps reflects Webster's dislike of the period noted by the book's editors. John Kidd looks perceptively at the mix of medicine, race, and radical politics in the late Scottish Enlightenment, which takes us nearly to the mid-nineteenth century and illustrates how anti-Celtic prejudices developed. Pietro Corsi throws light on the rapidly changing views in France as to what form the language of science should take in the period 1795–1802.

We then jump to the twentieth century...