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Michael Worboys, Spreading germs: disease theories and medical practice in Britain, 1865-1900, Cambridge History of Medicine series, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. xvi, 327, illus., L37.50, US$59.95 (hardback 0-521-77302-4).
Many historians of medicine will react to the publication of Michael Worboys' book with a gratified and perhaps exasperated exclamation: "At last!" When they sit down to read it, they will not be disappointed. Indeed, such a detailed and nuanced examination of British medical theory and practice during the early years of what we have all learned to call the Bacteriological Revolution is long overdue, and similarly sophisticated analyses in other national contexts are devoutly to be wished.
Steven Shapin's bon mot "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it" applies nearly as well to Worboys' treatment of germ theories, medicine, and public health in latenineteenth-century Britain (Steven Shapin, The scientific revolution, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 1). There was no Bacteriological Revolution, he seems to be telling us, and this fact deserves a book! Something important, even fundamental, changed in medicine during the last third of the nineteenth century, in Worboys' view, but the nature and mechanisms of the change were far more subtle, uneven, and gradual than we have been led to believe.
Worboys' approach represents a salutary departure from historiographical routine in several respects. Prior accounts of the rise of "germ theory" or "the germ theory of disease"-whether in monographs, articles, or chapters within more sweeping narratives-have concentrated on developments in French and German laboratories between 1880 and 1900 (and to a somewhat lesser degree on legislation and local government policies in the United States after 1900). Worboys shifts the geographical spotlight to Britain, a country on the periphery of early bacteriology; surgery, veterinary medicine, and "sanitary science" or "preventive medicine" reclaim in this book a central position among medical specialties; and the critical decade of the 1880s finds itself displaced as the crucial time of transition in favour of a judgement that, first, no single moment of decisive change can be identified and, second, the most significant historical transitions can be seen gathering momentum in the late 1860s and 1870s.
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