Poverty and welfare in England, 1700–1850: a regional perspective

long-term historical context is vital for their understanding. Of course, it would be asking a lot of any text of this nature to be fully comprehensive. However it would perhaps have been worth paying a bit more attention to regional differences in health and medicine in the period concerned. Britain is not a homogeneous entity, in health or any other terms, as much recent historical work has pointed out. And in a series entitled 'Social History in Perspective' we could perhaps have used a bit more social history, perhaps even at the expense of the more obviously medical history. None the less, this is a work which is clearly ahead of anything else in the field and as such is to be warmly welcomed.