Samuel Johnson in the medical world: the doctor and the patient

here, to the status of medical practitioners they were granted at the time. Sceptical of the claim of doctors to a superior skill, Jones presents the conflict as one of power and gender, rather than as a clash between science and superstition Beside filling a wide gap in our knowledge of the historical reality of hospitals, the book is a major contribution to the reassessment of prevailing assumptions about the development of medicine in ancien regime and Revolutionary France. Its shows that the growth of the influence of medical men did not follow a smooth and unbroken path, and it emphasizes, by constrast, the multiple functions embodied in the hospital. As demonstrated in the last part of the book, by the case studies of the institutions for the insane and the prostitute, the hospital was for a long time submitted to the needs of public order, and concerned with the preservation of families' reputations and the obligations of charity. Moreover, views about the status of medical men and state support for the profession did not follow linear trajectories but swung up and down considerably, as the third case study, devoted to military hospital and doctors, clearly indicates. Finally, "external" factors, like the economic crisis of the late eighteenth century and the changing ideas about war, heavily influenced the evolution of the hospital. Jones's ability to link the development of medicine with more general historical trends, and to deal confidently with the changing profile of French society are remarkable features, not always common among historians of medicine, of this book.