Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The scientific enterprise in late Victorian society

historical dimensions of one of these questions; the implications of instrumental diagnosis. He charts the rise of the major diagnostic instruments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and chronicles their gradual and not always enthusiastic adoption by the medical profession. He vividly illustrates both the profound diagnostic possibilities of such instruments and the more constant and frighteningly large factor of human fallibility. This latter he does not regard as being circumvented; he makes no plea for bigger and better instruments. What the work lacks is a slightly more suspicious approach to group interests. He makes, for instance, no reference whatsoever to the market relations ofmedical technology. Who are the manufacturers, and retailers? How is medical technology "sold" to the profession? He sees an obvious relation between technology and medical specialization, yet he does not investigate the possibility that specialists might pursue complex technology to advance their claims. Rather he portrays technology as passively calling forth special skills. Nor does Reiser place his findings in the broader context of industrial society. How important, for instance, is medical technology in removing responsibility and insight from the patient? What is the relation of this to the profession's putative role as a channel of social control? These however are methodological questions. Reiser's work has gone a long way to providing the material that makes it possible to ask them.