`De bevordering en volmaking der proefondervindelijke wijsbegeerte': de rol van het Bataafsch Genootschap te Rotterdam in de geschiedenis van de natuurwetenschappen, geneeskunde en techniek (1769–1988)

For all the obvious hazards and problems of using such a compilation, it is an extraordinary resource. It should surely provide the basis for a much-needed prosopography of the medical trade in the pre-reform era. The sheer proliferation ofnumbers (there are clearly well over 35,000 medical practitioners, in the narrow sense, listed here) provides ample confirmation of the arguments, recently adduced by Joan Lane, Irvine Loudon, Geoffrey Holmes, and others, that the practice of medicine was burgeoning in Georgian England-the trade was perhaps even becoming overstocked. Moreover, the Wallises' data demonstrate the extraordinary richness and variety of medical practice: army and navy surgeons abound, as do chemists and druggists, horse-doctors, tradesmen who double as booksellers and apothecaries, and, not least, women practitioners (far from all of whom are midwives). It is no surprise that some operators principally identified themselves as "inoculators"; it is intriguing to find other practitioners listed as "phlebotomists". In the early years of the "consumer economy", medicine, far from languishing, or being constrained by the traditional hierarchical pyramid of apothecary, surgeon, and physician, evidently flourished in tropical abundance, before the pruning action performed by Victorian professional reform. This index is a magnificent research tool which should help sustain the recent revival of interest in eighteenth-century medical history. Its authors deserve our grateful thanks.