Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform

Book excerpt: 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. "