Margaret Pelling and Scott Mandelbrote (eds), The practice of reform in health, medicine, and science, 1500–2000: essays for Charles Webster, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005, pp. xv, 376 (hardback 0-7546-3933-9).

Abstract

Published thirty years after The great instauration, Charles Webster's groundbreaking study of the seventeenth-century political and scientific revolution, The practice of reform is a tribute to Webster from his colleagues, former students and professional historians whom he has influenced and guided. Drawing their inspiration from the questions Webster's body of work has raised, the eighteen authors examine the effects that demands for social, political and religious reform had on medical and scientific theory and practice, and on the structure of healthcare. Following the main thrust of Webster's research, the volume spans the Renaissance to the present, although it is the early modern period and the twentieth century that dominate. Margaret Pelling's detailed essay on medical practitioners and office holding is the only chapter that straddles both periods in its examination of how medical practitioners were marginalized from the normal structures of male authority at a local, regional and national level. Other essays equally point to the importance of national, regional and local contexts or, as in the case of Linda Bryder in her comparative assessment of infant welfare services in New Zealand and England, Stefano Villani in his essay on the battle between innovators and conservatives in seventeenth-century Italy, and Anne Marie Rafferty in her essay on the Colonial Nursing Association (CNA), to international contexts and the exchange of knowledge.