Surgeons at war: medical arrangements for the treatment of the sick and wounded in the British army during the late 18th and 19th centuries

a pre-nineteenth-century or fabulous age, a Victorian heroic era and a modern age of triumph. Unlike Conrad who saw "geography triumphant" as cause for melancholy, the doctors perceived modem medicine as a source of celebration. Like geography too, nineteenth-century medicine was riven by arguments about where medical knowledge was to be made: was it in the ward, the museum or the laboratory? Similarly, medicine was torn by debates about expertise and gentility. That collection and display were central to nineteenth-century medicine needs no further comment here. And just as explorers developed paternalist and disciplinary ideologies in the midst of indigenous peoples so did doctors in the hospitals and the slum. The similarities go on and on. It is time someone explored them.