Wellcome witnesses to twentieth-century medicine

of the book). This does not always make for easy reading, especially since the heavy referencing is not accompanied by a bibliography. On the other hand, he covers a wide canvas and is very good at highlighting the dilemmas always present for industrial health researchers and physicians: without industry the profession can hardly exist, yet working with industry nearly always involves compromises. These dilemmas were made worse by the outlook of the medical men themselves. In a telling photo caption of an industrial physician at his desk, the author notes that such men hardly ever agreed to be photographed with workers, preferring to be seen with emblems of their science such as sheafs of statistics and x-rays. On the whole, though, Christopher Sellers suggests that industrial hygienists did a good job, imposing a discipline on the workplace through the courts, compensation boards, and even directly through the boardroom via their research links with industry. This may not convince everyone. Historians who have looked at individual industries have painted a more depressing view of industrial physicians as company-oriented individuals, whose work did little to ameliorate a system heavily stacked against the worker. This book makes little mention of corporate suppression of research, suggests that state laws compensated workers (without offering any detailed case studies from business records), and argues that medical networks ensured that industrialists paid for the hazards they inflicted on their workforce. That is certainly not the experience of many victims of industrial disease, either in America or elsewhere. Overall, however, this is an impressive book, which will obviously be required reading for anyone interested in the history of occupational health.