Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution (review)

Few disciplines have felt the death of biography, proclaimed by several generations of social historians, so keenly as the history of medicine. Continued emphasis on writing “history from below,” and a tendency to dismiss all individual biography as hagiography, has encouraged historians of medicine to seek other ways to place patients and physicians in their historical context. Crowther and Dupree have responded to this challenge by combining a broadly sociological methodology—collective biography–with passages of thick description drawn from the microhistorical tradition. They offer a collective biography of 1,938 Scottish medical students who began their studies at Edinburgh or Glasgow—then the two largest medical schools in the British Empire—between 1866 and 1874.

Crowther and Dupree begin with a spirited reconstruction of the first day at medical school and spend the first four chapters exploring the social, professional, intellectual, and economic dimensions of student life. They use photographs to explore the expression of these associations and distinctions through dress and deportment—for instance, the silk top hats worn by Edinburgh students who had passed their first professional qualification. By choosing to study a well-defined group, and by paying particular attention to the cultural fault-lines within that group, they get around the biggest challenge of this method—selecting a body of subjects without imposing a false sense of coherence.

This dual methodology permits Crowther and Dupree to relate the experiences of their cohort to the social networks that they fashioned at all stages of their lives. In many cases, these networks followed lines of communication underpinned by the British colonial project. Some students were “old India hands” who had served in the Indian Medical Service for decades but now required a medical degree to meet the requirements of the 1858 Medical Act. Others were some of the earliest women to seek a medical education; their experiences shaped the entry of women into British medicine in subsequent decades. By focusing on Scottish medical schools (and, by implication, decentering London), Crowther and Dupree open a fascinating window on the framing of British national identity, revealing some of the ways in which the members of a geographically and ethnically diverse group came to think of themselves as British. Roughly half of the cohort were not Scottish by birth, but their experiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow imparted a style of medical thought and practice that was both distinctively Scottish and typically British.

Crowther and Dupree have clearly (and justly) aimed this book at those with a decent working knowledge of British medical history. The first chapter dives straight into a historiographical analysis of medical professionalization, making only cursory efforts to open the subject to workers in other disciplines. But notwithstanding this minor quibble, this book represents collective biography in its most humane sense, combining sociological insight and historical analysis to illuminate individuals and groups in their time and place.