A New and Untried Course: Woman's Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850-1998 (review)

medicine. Humphry was instrumental in gaining the appointment of the third of the triumvirate, and the best-known figure of the period, the physiologist Michael Foster. It is impossible to do justice here to the arguments and politics that Weatherall describes for the period 1880–1920, but they almost always involved physiology. Institutional questions divided college and university, medical boards and natural science boards, and hospital and university. Intellectual issues were often centered on the Natural Science Tripos (one of those mysteries that insiders take for granted), and how much physiology medical students should learn, and whether a training in physiological methods was a training in the methods students should use on the wards. Pathology was a contested subject too: was it a clinical or a preclinical subject? Should it come under the umbrella of the natural sciences? In the wings, haunting these questions, was lurking the issue of whether physicians were gentlemen or whether medicine was merely a trade. Comedy is here, in the chapter on medical students and their ghastly lampoons. This chapter has an invaluable section on the courses a student might or must take, and for me it unraveled a number of organizational mysteries; something similar earlier in the book would have been a help. If there is a tragic figure in this play, it is the Regius professor, Clifford Allbutt, torn between devotion to the basic sciences and loyalty to his profession. The story concludes with the appointment of John Ryle as Regius, and the installation of clinical research as the compromise between science and medicine. This is the first major modern study of a modernizing medical school. It is unique in its particulars, but the general picture is familiar. Other studies from other scholars are in the pipeline, on Edinburgh, St. Mary’s, and St. Bartholomew’s. Mark Weatherall is to be thanked for showing one way such a study can be done.