Angels and citizens: British women as military nurses 1854–1914

they served. At an intermediate level, pharmacologists at the University of Wisconsin did good by contributing to new products for the many firms which they advised, and by bringing money and technical resources from the industry to their university. At the most specific level, the harrowing tale is recounted of the difficulties between Eli Lilly and the University of Toronto about insulin, and the lesser difficulties which the same firm experienced in working with the Universities of Harvard and Rochester in developing liver extracts for the treatment ofanaemia. The recent surge of agreements between universities and industry, resembling that in Germany a century ago, is treated in some detail, and the dangers to academic freedom of thought and action are considered dispassionately. Commercial ambitions all too readily lead to the suppression of truth and the fettering of enquiry, and in the long run to the destruction of commercial enterprise itself. The problems are not solved, but at a time when haughty isolation has given place to a sometimes undignified gallop after all the funds which can be obtained, it is vital that a history ofpast successes and mistakes is available, and that there is writing on the wall for all to read. This history is a valuable contribution to the subject. This book is neatly titled. Dr Summers meticulously examines female nursing practice and politics within the context of upper-class feminist aspirations. Thereby she enlarges women's history and offers much that is new to medical history. Her study of the Nightingale and Stanley parties at Scutari and the Crimea extends recent revisions. These warring chiefs were less practised nurses than their waged underlings: they successfully defended their presumption by libelling their nurses and orderlies. Dr Summers suggests that the intoxication charges upon which several were dismissed can reasonably be taken as ill-founded. She follows the "ladies" in classing the nurses with domestic servants, but does not pursue the speculation that many might have been experienced private domestic nurses, trusted, self-employed people far from Gamp caricatures. This class struggle, Dr Summers proves, vitiated women's attempts to win power in the hospitals. Idly seraphic ladies gatecrashed wards to exercise "spiritual" authority over coarse male patients (not officers, about whom there is a fascinating appendix), medical officers of humble origins, and the unspiritual women who did the work. The split persists, if we substitute "credentialed" for "seraphic". Throughout the period the division helped …