Becoming a physician: medical education in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1750–1945

uncertain, and the state lacked the resources for major infrastructural reform. "Medical policing", one of the Enlightenment slogans of the day, thus remained more ideal than reality. In her final Chapter, Lindemann looks at the choices people took when they were confronted with the problem of illness. Fatalism and resignation were relatively uncommon. Most people preferred being well to being ill, and did not need the authorities to persuade them of the virtues of health. They usually tried a variety of treatments and went to a variety of sources for them; in this process, they neither scorned the university-trained physician nor relied on folk remedies and magical cures, which were far less widespread than many historians have assumed. What Lindemann's absorbing and very readable book achieves, therefore, is to use detailed archival study of the grass-roots of medical practice to undermine widespread notions in German historiography of the eighteenth century as an age of nascent professionalization and sharp divergence between popular and elite attitudes to medicine and health. Medical practitioners of all kinds, including university-trained physicians, employed a variety of techniques in which the popular and the academic were often intermingled. As exemplified by a small town or rural district Physicus, "Enlightenment" could often degenerate into crankiness which local people were well advised to regard with suspicion. The idea of an "Enlightened" state trying to impose proper standards of health and hygiene on an indifferent rural society is revealed as myth. Lindemann backs up these persuasive arguments with a mass of fascinating detail. Her splendid book is not only a triumphant vindication of a broad-based, theoretically and historiographically informed approach to the social history of medicine, but also shows how much can be achieved when historians marry theory and historiography to detailed empirical research by rolling up their sleeves and getting to work on dusty and unread files in obscure provincial archives.