Andreas-Holger Maehle, Contesting Medical Confidentiality, Origins of the Debate in the United States, Britain and Germany (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 168, $40.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-226-40482-0.

at measures encouraged by hygienic and moral reasoning, playing an important role in the building of the modern sociological and cultural limits of childhood. But they were not built on a rational scientific basis, and that had serious consequences. Both models failed not only by not ending child labour, but also by increasing the precariousness of children’s lives. In the long term, families did not find that social reforms rebuilt the economic and biological calamity linked to the unemployment of any of their members, and the reforms increased the supply of their own children’s labour. Borrás Llop treats this problem throughout the last chapter of his edited volume, prioritising the use of sources created by the labour movement over medical-official sources. As he says ‘in labour history the general approaches need to be nuanced, contrasted, with micro-approaches, to give diversity in a defined context’ (p. 447), but he is aware of the small amount of what he calls ‘egosources’, and his use of the workingclass press seems not only justified, but also clever. Borrás does not seek to analyse the programmatic positions taken by different working groups about child labour, his main interest revolves around identifying the importance that child labour had in the daily life of workers. This question posed to this source gives results very similar to those that Kirby obtains using the personal testimonies of doctors, politicians and workers who criticised the government’s labour reforms. This last piece of research, in Chapter 12, gives greater precision to the subject of study of the whole book and it leads us to reflect on how following in the footsteps of work like Kirby’s is becoming the dominant trend in Spanish historiography on child labour in Spain, offering an optimistic picture of its future. Borrás has offered his discipline a more solid ground, and now it is desirable that, taking his example, new researchers become much more aware of simply mimicking of the methods of historiographical traditions such as the English or German ones, driven by the quality and quantity of their sources. Faced with this situation, the Spanish historian must demonstrate a greater methodological versatility. But, after all, what readers should learn in a historical work about child labour is that although this phenomenon has been virtually eradicated in our immediate environment, it has been a continuous variable throughout the history of human societies. Many of our new living standards are still contrasted by the survival of child labour in more distant places, and that is why beyond rejection and victimisation, the work of the historian should move toward reflection about the complexity of the causes of this persistence. In doing so, Kirby and Borrás have achieved outstanding work.