Professional gentlemen: the professions in nineteenth-century Ontario

of similar trials in Wurttemburg are especially perspicacious on this point. In a completely different vein, Joel Peter Eigen's essay on insanity and English law during the period 1800-1840 also depicts a situation in which criminal or civil law could be tempered, a role that medicine would continue to play nearly a century later, as Barbara Brookes and Paul Roth found in their study of the Bourne case and the medicalization of abortion. Perhaps not surprisingly, the cohesive quality of the first half of Legal medicine in history is much less apparent in the second part. Covering a period when the connections between law and medicine have become much more routine and substantial, the collection fragments into a series of individual studies of particular aspects of the complex ways in which law and medicine have intersected. Among the most interesting is Stephen Watson's Foucauldian examination of the prison as a site for the production of expert knowledge about mental deficiency, a tale that highlights the ways in which the legal system itself could structure observations under which new medical conditions would become visible and real. On the whole, Legal medicine in history is a highly successful collection. While it might have been improved by maintaining its focus on England and certainly by expanding its coverage of material in the period 1850 to the present, it does an excellent job of raising some important questions about the relations between medicine and law in England and of providing acute insights into the connections between developments in legal medicine and the social/political/cultural worlds in which these changes were taking place.