Medicine in the making of modern Britain, 1700-1920

involved, not least the leading player himself, Sir Henry Wellcome. So full praise to John Symons for having laid a firm path through this mixed vegetation and erected plain signposts to mark each succeeding stage on the way, as well as for the limpid prose ornamented by irony and understated wit with which he achieves this, to say nothing of his delightful footnotes. The section which speaks most directly to the reviewer is that evoking the Institute's chrysalis years under Dr Poynter's leadership. Recruited as a young librarian not long before Sir Henry's death, this completely dedicated self-made man was happily able to spend the summit years of his long career turning his beloved though sadly dilapidated library (and later museum) into a handsomely furnished and well staffed Mecca for medical historians from the world over. Those were formative years for the subject in Great Britain. One may doubt whether Dr Poynter, with all his vision, expected his labours to produce the astonishing academic fruits that flourish today. And yet, by an ironic twist this outcome was made practically possible only by the Trust's brave decision to amputate the museum, which Dr Poynter had striven with considerable success to modernize, from the library. This and much else lies in my memory from those vital years between 1960 and 1973. I recall particularly the great camaraderie between staff and readers. Each side learned from the other. To sum up, John Symons has performed a signal service to the Institute by showing it to be the culmination of an extraordinary sequence of events that can happen, really, only once. Overviews of the history of medicine tend to be "useful" at best. Most strive to cover the field for a specified period, blandly providing some idea of recent trends in historiography. Medicine in the making of modern Britain is refreshingly different. It does not purport to be a synthesis of the latest literature, though it draws on the best of it. Nor does it aspire to be either a critique or a polemic, though it is rich in critical thought and highly provocative. It is, rather, in the proper sense of the word, an essay-a wide ranging, yet controlled disquisition, which compels by virtue of its intellectual breadth, sagacity and acumen, but, above all, by having something to say, somewhere to take its reader. That "somewhere" is the centrality of the "interventive clinical …