Matrons, medics and maladies: inside Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in the 1840s

that century. Lazaro's piece is the only one dealing with psychiatry outside the AngloFranco-Germanic world, and it also makes clear that Spanish history operates on a very different time line from the north-west of Europe. A cursory view of the remainder of the south and east of Europe calls into question whether the traditional history of psychiatry, focusing on the north-west, applies outside that region. This is surely an appropriate question for consideration at the European Association for the History of Psychiatry. This is a somewhat different theme than that of the current volume, and not meant as a criticism. It is instead intended as a challenge to social historians in the relevant countries.