The multinational corporation

followed, and English readers will find many parallels. This is history seen from below, and Professor Melosh looks sympathetically on the craft methods, practical experience, and self-control that dominated the lives of nurses in the old apprenticeship system in the diploma schools. It was an occupational culture, a shared work experience that gave value and colour to their lives. The section on hospital nursing today is highly relevant. In order to raise the status of nurses, American leaders have concentrated on the expansion of the baccalaureate system, but this has led them, not to professional autonomy, but to middle management. Professor Melosh sees a solution to the conflict that has been discussed on this side of the Atlantic-the exploration of new forms of health care delivery that give nurses a more prominent role in counselling and advising. Professor T. McKeown and others over here have made this point, and with an ageing population and ever-increasing demands for health care, an extended role for the nurse needs to be considered. The whole history of nursing is about this extension. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the industries that depends heavily on international operations. As such, it provides an illustrative, if somewhat atypical model tor economists studying various aspects of multinational corporate behaviour. The first two-thirds of Sanjaya Lall's collection of essays on multinationals approaches the behaviour of international business from the point of view of an economist interested in general questions of the effects on less developed countries, the practice of transfer pricing, the activities of large corporations in India and Malaysia. In the last third he looks at the pharmaceutical industry in a way which is informed by the more general studies preceding, but which is an attempt to look more empirically. It is interesting to note the extent to which the models proposed in the first part fail to apply to his case study. On the other hand, the economic analysis does provide a framework in which to place many otherwise perhaps disconnected observations about the industry, and it leads him to a number of issues which a non-economist might have overlooked. To what extent, for example, does the cost of buying up international patents waste research and development funds? How do government regulations affect the way drugs are marketed in different countries? Historians of medicine might find such a book difficult to use, but there are a number …