Advancing with the Army: Medicine, the Professions, and Social Mobility in the British Isles 1790-1850, by Marcus Ackroyd, Laurence Brockliss, Michael Moss, Kate Retford, and John Stevenson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Advancing with the Army: Medicine, the Professions, and Social Mobility in the British Isles 1790–1850 Douglas M. Peers (bio) Advancing with the Army: Medicine, the Professions, and Social Mobility in the British Isles 1790–1850, by Marcus Ackroyd, Laurence Brockliss, Michael Moss, Kate Retford and John Stevenson; pp. xv + 376. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, £68.00, $120.00. Advancing with the Army is not about medicine and warfare, nor is it an institutional study of medicine and the British Army. It is instead a remarkably detailed and richly textured exploration of some of the key characteristics, processes, and consequences of professionalization for one cohort in Britain, and the opportunities these afforded its participants for social and spatial mobility in an era of profound change occasioned by unprecedented economic growth in Britain and prolonged warfare in Europe and beyond. It accomplishes this by making use of the extensive records that the administration of the British Army amassed about the lives of the surgeons who entered their service. Particularly rich pickings were gleaned from the pro forma questionnaires that surgeons had to complete upon joining the army and which were subsequently compiled into registers. These questionnaires, along with information mined from other sources (including a growing number that are cropping up in cyberspace) were then used to reconstruct in painstaking [End Page 481] detail the genealogies of just over 450 surgeons. The wealth of detail collected and collated about the origins, education, military postings, post-army careers, and physical movements of these surgeons were then plugged into a relational database that enabled the authors to test empirically a number of hypotheses concerning the relationship between professionalization and social mobility, military service and national identity, and the social forms and practices through which professionals defined and represented themselves. The authors’ choice of army surgeons for this prosopography—that is, the collective analysis of a large group of individuals—was not determined exclusively by the quality and quantity of personal details that they could recover, though obviously this was an important factor since few lives were so assiduously documented as those of the officers and rank and file of the British military. Equally important was that such figures were in the words of the authors, “precociously professionalized” (16) owing to the competencies they had to acquire and for which they were tested, their hierarchical organization, and their ability to secure a level of self-regulation and governance (at least once they left the army) that singled them out from other cohorts within the middle classes. Moreover, these surgeons straddled the divide between state and private service as they passed into and out of the army, which gave the authors the opportunity to explore the extent to which war accelerated professionalization. The end result is a work that systematically tests a number of the beliefs underpinning debates over professionalization, social mobility, and the emergence of modern British society. The authors convincingly demonstrate that professionalization as experienced by surgeons in the service of the British Army enabled many recruits from humble backgrounds to enjoy considerable social mobility, particularly those whose origins lay along the Celtic fringes. Scots and Scots-Irish surgeons were disproportionately represented within the ranks of the army’s medical corps, and the subsequent careers of these surgeons demonstrate how military service helped foster a sense of an overarching British identity. But social mobility was not evenly experienced nor was it guaranteed—luck, the ability to find a patron, and social networking all contributed to success. So too did the proclivity of many of these surgeons to become active contributors in the pursuit of scientific, historical, ethnographic, and statistical knowledge. Their self-representation as men of science furthered their claims to respectability. The authors also trace the geographical dispersal of these surgeons. Following military service, many either retired or moved into civil practice in and around the Home Counties, married locally, and thereby distanced themselves from their Scots and Irish roots. Consequently, professionalization was instrumental in helping to fashion a more transcendent British identity, one that the authors show to have been infused with a faith in science and progress yet constrained by an underlying conservative political...