Modern medicine in England as we know it today is chiefly the product of the scientific developments of the nineteenth century. These advances included improved sanitation, the acceptance of the germ theory of disease as a result of the emergence of microbiology, and the advent of painless and routine surgical procedures. How then did medicine evolve in Lancaster during the nineteenth century? The focus here is the history of medicine in Lancaster and a community of practice amongst a few medical professionals who shaped Lancaster’s medical landscape. The reader will be introduced to these remarkable medical men and their names will gradually become familiar. Many of these individuals were second and even third generation surgeons and physicians. Background to these pioneers, as well as their successes and failures, is sketched within the context of Lancaster’s socio-economic environment and growth as an industrial town. This volume also marks the main medical events in Lancaster, including the establishment of a Dispensary, which evolved into the Royal Lancaster Infirmary, the Public Health movement and the rise of the Asylums.

Sir Charles Bell was among the last of a generation medical men who formed their careers, their research, and their publications through the private classrooms of early-nineteenth-century London; whose ambitions for reform were fundamentally about conserving something quintessentially British; and whose politics were shaped by the exigencies of developing a living through various kinds of patronage in a time when careers in medical science simply did not exist. Within a decade or two that world was gone. Professionalization and regularized educationthe ambitions of reformershad been realized, along with regular career paths. With that change, the classroom shattered, its functions divided among other spaces, each with its own audience and function: the laboratory, the clinic, the classroom. They are the spaces of modern medicine, the ones we recognize today, and we see them as the hallmark of medical science. Through Bell s story, artfully told by the author, we witness medical science and medical reform in London s classrooms at a time when modern medicine, with its practical universities with set curricula, staffed by medical professionals, was being born. "