Barbara Melosh, “The Physician's Hand” Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. 260 pp.

upon. The command of recent scholarship, so obvious in the earlier part, is missing here and in the treatment of the popular front in France and Spain, where the articles in Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte, Journal of Contemporary History, Le Mouvement Social, and Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz are indispensable. The book ends with a sketchy chapter on the post-World War II period but there is no real conclusion. The long-range problems of socialism remain unaddressed: the tendency toward bureaucracy and dirigisme, the pressures from below for participation; the destructive conflicts over orthodoxy and apostacy; the frequent lapses into romantic mystification; the failure to link cultural programs to political perspectives; and the changing composition and size of the working class itself. When one adds up these various reservations about the last third of the book one cannot help but conclude that many of them could not have been made if the author had expanded his study by 100 pages. Still, for some 200 pages Lindemann has given us a lucid and illuminating international history of socialism. It is the best book on the subject to put in the hands of our students.