Weltgeschichte der Homöopathie. Länder—Schulen—Heilkundige

nineteenth-century antecedents to the National Health Service reorganization of 1974. It is a worthy, highly detailed, scrupulously documented, and very thorough account of the ups and downs of a social service; and it is terribly dull, and in places most laboriously written. The first chapter proper, which relates the impact of the report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration of 1904, sets an ominous stage for what is to come. It borrows no zest from, for example, Dorothy Porter's lively essay on doctors and deterioration ('Enemies of race', Victorian Studies, 1991-not listed in Harris's bibliography) but regurgitates in paraphrase and direct quotation chunks of evidence from the Committee minutes, prefaced by leaden lead-ins: 'He considered that', 'He wrote that', 'He claimed that', 'He argued that', and so on. The bitterness of these complaints springs from my own disappointment with this book. Bernard Harris is an able historian, who has written lucid and compelling articles on anthropometric history, one of which at least has achieved classic status. What is it about twentieth-century administrative/social policy history that stifles the historian's imagination, and turns a stylish pen turgid as ancient ink? Maybe the problem lies in the material-in the overwhelming wealth of data on administrative and political minutiae which has survived in official papers and professional journals. Such plenty too easily overcomes the historian's wider view of the wood, as distinct from the trees, of his chosen subject area; just as sheer volume and constraints of time compel him to narrow his range of sources. Reconceptualized as a history of children's health, in which the school medical service played a more or less significant part, this might have been an altogether livelier volume. A greater range of sources might have both broadened and enriched this account. Oral history, surely, could have furnished a contribution, as could non-official writingsmemoirs and novels. Some feeling for the wider historical context of the material presented would also have been welcome. How could Harris baldly present a paragraph on the improvement of childrens' teeth during World War II (p. 171) without some mention of the impact of rationing on the manufacture and consumption of sweets, and of the world of child preferences and family values which lay behind the peacetime carious teeth? Harris is sceptical about the overall impact of the school medical service, which expended most of its energies in inspecting children above anything else; it is a pity that he did not achieve the broader and more informed account of childrens' health in the twentieth century which his main title implies.