The eighteenth-century campaign to avoid disease

lunatic asylums, the tentative steps towards non-asylum psychiatric practice in the first half of the twentieth century, and the subsequent adoption of a policy euphemistically called "6community care". Busfield has read quite widely in the recent secondary literature, and draws upon a diverse range of scholarship (MacDonald, Parry-Jones, Kathleen Jones, Hunter and Macalpine, Aubrey Lewis, Scull), as well as on a limited range of primary materials (Maudsley's writings, the Reports of Royal Commissions in 1926 and 1957), to construct her own account of these developments. Once again, all this is sound enough (though one is tempted to quibble here and there); but it offers little in the way of new information or research. Overall, then, this is a book which surveys a rather broad terrain. Parts One and Two of the work are only weakly linked to each other, and the general level is ofan advanced undergraduate text, rather than a monograph offering new research or a striking new synthesis of available materials. As such, it is a reasonably useful volume which can be recommended to those seeking an initial acquaintance with recent issues in the field. Specialists, however, will find little here with which they are not already familiar.