Sexual science: the Victorian construction of womanhood

of these case studies ably do; but having done this, to go beyond reductive explanations the historian must then ask why some people from the group elected to embrace that particular medical option while others did not. We also need to know much more about how public pronouncements about healing deployed in highly politicized arenas correspond to more private belief and behaviour. Most of these studies draw exclusively on public rhetoric, much of it highly polemical; yet one clear message of the new social history has been that such public pronouncements must not be read as exhaustive or unproblematic representations of reality. The essays brought together in these volumes are a promising springboard for future work on alternative medicine. What is in some ways most promising, though, is an appealingly subversive subtext that runs through both collections. All the contributors wish to move away from a preoccupation with orthodoxy in medical history, but they remain unable to wrench free from the problem that unorthodox medicine received its definition from what it was not-that is, orthodox. Cooter, in an intriguing essay that explores "just how cosmologically alternative were the alternatives" (p. 75), uncovers multiple layers of overlap between orthodoxy and fringe, and many ofthe other contributors do the same less systematically. Indeed, the best ofthese essays all display uneasiness with the fact that abolishing the orthodox/unorthodox duality also tends to undercut the rationale for volumes of historical scholarship devoted to separatist studies of unorthodox medicine, however heuristically valuable such works are. Medical orthodoxy, after all, was a concept that the historical actors themselves not only invented but also disputed. It changed over time, as Porter's contrast of eighteenthand nineteenth-century Britain underscores, and over place, as comparison of nineteenth-century Britain with America would amply reveal, and it was always fuzzy. In the final analysis, perhaps what these two collections should most urge upon us is a history not of either orthodox medicine or alternative medicine, but a more fully integrated history of healing. If, as both editors argue, the concerns of the present are one leading motivation for studying the expressions and meaning of alternative medicine of the past, then this tack is doubly attractive, for it also holds the promise of relevance. Dismantling a rigid dichotomy between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, after all, may be one of the most helpful ways for us to better understand the pluralism that is so distinctly emerging as a hallmark of post-modernist medical culture.