Conceptions of ether. Studies in the history of ether theories 1840–1900

decisive break away from the hospitals' traditional orientation. The reactionary old clique of administrators was overturned, and new faces entered hospital administration, bringing with them a more liberal approach and a more receptive attitude to medical innovation. The ablebodied, incurables, and malingerers were more carefully weeded out, in an effort to make hospital populations truly "case m6dicaux" rather than merely "cas sociaux". And real improvements were made in medical services (closer medical supervision, reform of the intern system, the modernization of hospital pharmacies, the use of scientific instruments, a greater openness to clinical instruction, etc.) and, consequently, in general standards of internal hygiene and conditions (water supplies, floor cleaning, heating, etc.). The actual hospitals whose history Faure here recreates remain somewhat shadowy the English reader at least will regret not having the different types of institution (Hotel-Dieu, Charite, Antiquaille,. . .) more clearly delineated. Conversely, however, the character of life within the institutions comes across particularly strikingly. Close analysis of the whole range of archival riches available to the historian of hospitals reveals the institutions not at all as the Foucaultesque spaces for the refinement of techniques of social discipline and dressage imagined by some historians. Rather, they emerge as sprawling, dirty, complex, overcrowded, unkempt, noisy, and altogether more human institutions. Even if by mid-century the idea of a machine a gue'rir had triumphed in Lyons "dans les esprits", the day still seemed far off when it would be achieved "dans les faits". The medicalization of the provincial French hospital evidently still had far to go. Colin Jones University of Exeter