532 Book Reviews

Drawing upon the Nobel archives at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Crawford provides a detailed account of how Alfred Nobel’s vaguely defined ideas for scientific prizes were transformed into a new institution in the course of negotiations between the executors of his will, Swedish scientists and government officials, and members of the Nobel family. The success of these negotiations owed much to the fact that Swedish scientists and the Swedish government saw the Nobel money as an opportunity to enhance the international prestige of Swedish institutions and culture. The international respect for the awards, however, derived from the manner in which the early selection committees chose distinguished international laureates and from the apparent objectivity of the Swedes. In fact, as Crawford shows, the prizewinners were selected through a complicated process of international nominations, internal committee debates and political lobbying before they won the consensus of the Royal Academy. Since few people knew how the Nobel committees actually conducted their business, Crawford’s description of the conflicts among Swedish scientists offers an intriguing inside perspective on the way in which personalities, academic rivalries and competing intellectual schools affected the ‘objective’ evaluation of various candidates for the awards.

The internal processes of prize selection form only part of the Nobel story, though, and Crawford undertakes also to explain why the awards evoked widespread public interest. The great financial value naturally contributed to their exceptional prestige (one Nobel prize, for example, equalled all prize money distributed by the French Academy of Sciences in an entire decade), but the prizes also became famous because they fit easily into contemporary ideologies of national competition and heroic individualism. Journalists viewed the Nobel prizes like Olympic games in which the number of prizewinners from each nation revealed comparative levels of civilisation and national accomplishment. At the same time, the prizes ‘took on symbolic significance because they revived, on the international level, an emphasis on individual achievement that seemed to be receding from the day-to-day experience of national scientific communities’ (p. 205).

Crawford’s analysis suggests the importance of cultural and political forces in the comprehension and uses of modern scientific knowledge. Similarly, Feingold’s account of scientists in seventeenth-century England indicates that they, too, were affected by non- scientific interests that surrounded them inside and outside the university-though he draws the cultural connections less convincingly than Crawford does for the early twentieth century. These two studies of important moments in the intellectual, institutional history of science therefore reaffirm the historical fact that social values, science and other forms of culture overlap more often than some scientists or the modern public may want to believe.

Northwestern University Lloyd S. Kramer

Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence, Katharine Park (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985), xii + 298 pp.

In the past decade the historiography of medicine has assumed a remarkably new face, thanks largely to the influence of the ‘new social history’. Historians w,ho have attempted to fuse medical history and social history have increasingly turned to the themes and strategies of the social historian in creating their research agenda. This book on Florentine doctors and medicine shares important yet limited points of contact with current historiographical trends. Park’s major concern in writing this institutional and social history of the medical profession in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence is the effect of plague on that profession. The course of her analysis leads her to assess the variety of medical care available in the pre- and post-plague periods, the ordering of medicine by corporate structures, and the disruption ofprofessional recruitment patterns by recurrent

Book Reviews 533

waves of plague. She convincingly takes issue with the dominant English model of the process of professionalisation. Like the Florentine social historians whose work she draws on, Park has plucked from the bounty of archival sources that make Florentine historical discourse virtually a world unto itself, while adding a comparative dimension with other Italian cities and with northern Europe frequently lacking in Florentine studies. Yet these achievements are marred by a surprising lack of analytical depth, leaving the evidence underutilised and the issues at stake undefined.

In the first chapter, Park describes the corporate structure of the Guild of Doctors. Apothecaries, and Grocers in which physicians, surgeons, and empirics were enrolled. Following lines of inquiry well-established by Florentine social historians, Park argues for close collegial bonds and corporate solidarity among doctors. It was theguild rather than the Florentine commune or university that set licensing standards for practitioners; hence it was the guild that controlled privileges of monopoly and autonomy characteristic of professions. The great plague of 1348 triggered a crisis in the medical profession and a change in guild structure by prompting an influx into the city of immigrant practitioners, especially empirics, from the surrounding district and further afield. Park sees the most alarming effect of plague on the status of doctors as their virtual disappearance from the guild’s power structure, in which previously they had been well-represented. As immigrants from both far and near joined, and native Florentines left the medical profession, doctors were pushed to the margins of the guild’s political community. They regained their authority only after 1560 when prominent Florentines again chose medicine as a career.

Park takes up the reasons for this shift in geographical patterns of recruitment among medical practitioners in the following chapter. Here again she sees the plague as a decisive factor. Plague provoked a flight from the profession among native Florentines and their sons, To them, doctors seemed too vulnerable to the hazards of plague, the profession too risky when other career options were available. For foreigners, on the other hand. Park offers a limited economic explanation, arguing that foreign doctors were lured to the city by the opportunities it presented. Apparently for these men, economic motives outweighed the fear of death that native Fiorentines found somehow more compelling. Social, geographical, and personal dynamics are painted here with a disturbingly flat brush. Preeminence within the guild was indeed playing for high stakes, and surely generated more tension and rivalry than is implied. If guild ties were as strongly felt as she argues elsewhere, and books added an expensive ‘practical argument in favor of occupational inheritance among doctors’ (p.126), the decision to abandon a traditional family profession and assume a new career must have been charged with conflicts that are barely hinted at here.

The third chapter outlining the public, ecclesiastical, and private sectors of the medical marketplace offers several nice discussions of hospitals and the delivery of health care to the poor. The fourth chapter discusses medical careers, where Park again posits the attractions of an urban ‘lifestyle’ to country doctors, especially to these with university training. Yet the analysis in both chapters seems wanting; the role of Christian and civic value systems in shaping the structure of health care, and the cultural dislocation that immigration posed to rural doctors are glossed over. Her archival data raise problems that are not so easily disposed of.

The fifth chapter attempts to place doctors as an occupational group in their socioeconomic context. Park claims that a very high proportion ofsuccessful doctors were ‘new men’, fairly wealthy but socially obscure. Their income varied by type of practice (physicians were the wealthiest), and by geographical origin (local immigrants were the most affluent, more distant ‘foreigners’ the least, with native Florentines spread across all levels). Doctors’ patterns of social mobility differed from those of Florentine lawyers as set out by Lauro Martines; for lawyers, the profession consolidated an already established social position, whereas for doctors, the profession made their social position. One

534 Book Reviews

wonders how the medical profession advanced the social status of families when the status of medicine was supposedly in decline, and how doctors’ social relations remained so generally untroubled.

The sixth and final chapter assesses doctors’ contributions to the Florentine intellectual and cultural patrimony. Park examines physicians’ libraries, which consisted mainly of Latin medical texts. She argues for a relatively vital academic culture at the University of Florence (albeit one overshadowed by Padua and Bologna), and treats the physician Tommaso de1 Garbo’s work with sure hands. Yet her main point, that doctors were more often patrons of, than participants in, learned inquiry, rests on shaky analytical ground, and the question of relations between a learned and a more popular medical culture is passed over. Following a conclusion that reiterates the major lines of argument are four appendices of varying utility.

The archival data presented about this occupational group should prove useful both to Florentine historians and to those doing cross-cultural studies in the history of medicine. Had the author worried over and teased out more of the structural problems and social implications the data present, that contribution would have been enhanced.

Sharon T. Strocchia University of South Carolina

Benjamin Kidd: Portrait of a Social Darwin&, D.P. Crook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), ix + 460 pp., f30.00.

Open any textbook of British political and social thought and you will find passing reference to Benjamin Kidd (1858-1916): autodidact, Social Darwinist, and author offive books and nearly two hundred articles and essays. Generally there is awed testimony to the celebrity of Kidd’s first book, published when he was still a junior clerk in the Board of Inland Revenue. SocialEvolution (1894) went into nineteen British editions in four years, was translated into ten languages including Arabic and Chinese, sold over two hundred thousand copies, and earned its author tens of thousands of pounds. These royalties enabled Kidd to retire from his modest civil service job, devote the rest of his life to scientific and political journalism, and dabble on the fringes ofthe emerging social science disciplines.

Although Social Evolution and Kidd’s later works were scorned by many academics as derivative and half-baked, the man had astounding influence upon the intellectual politics of his day. He wrote the article on sociology for the tenth and eleventh editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, helped establish the British Sociological Society, contributed prolifically to the major intellectual journals, belonged to tlite discussion clubs, and was consulted by Arthur Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain, Alfred Milner, and other public men. These were singular accomplishments for the early-school-leaving son of an Irish police constable. Kidd’s earliest association with a university was as a guest lecturer, not a student.

Harry Elmer Barnes in 1922 called Benjamin Kidd ‘the first important English sociological writer after Herbert Spencer’. Two generations later, Robert C. Bannister described Kidd’s bestseller as pop sociology which ‘almost everyone’disliked on second- thought’. Whatever its scholarly merits, SocialEvolution was a landmark work because it updated Social Darwinism. It modified the rationalistic, individualistic, competitive model indentitied with Spencer and William Graham Spencer, and introduced a collectivist, cooperative version. The latter dovetailed neatly with the currents of neo- Hegelian idealism, irrationalism, and mystical nationalism that were strong at the turn of the century. Kidd’s interpretation of Social Darwinism synthesised elements of natural selection, imperialism, state socialism, transcendental religious enthusiasm, and belief in