This book follows the path of Charles Bell’s professional life in London. At the same time, chapters are organized so as to move through the different spaces in which medical teaching was done in Britain, from London’s emerging networks of private school classrooms and charitable hospitals with their informal systems of courses and patronage, to the journals that reprinted the contents of classroom lectures and that purported to build politically unified audiences and communities, and finally, to the two sets of institutions developed to replace London’s many private classrooms and to serve as ... More

This book follows the path of Charles Bell’s professional life in London. At the same time, chapters are organized so as to move through the different spaces in which medical teaching was done in Britain, from London’s emerging networks of private school classrooms and charitable hospitals with their informal systems of courses and patronage, to the journals that reprinted the contents of classroom lectures and that purported to build politically unified audiences and communities, and finally, to the two sets of institutions developed to replace London’s many private classrooms and to serve as the site of comprehensive and systematic medical education: London University and London’s second wave of hospital schools. This journey through the pedagogical spaces within which Bell moved ends with a chapter on the priority dispute over the discovery of motor and sensory nerves that shaped and outlasted Bell’s career. Nineteenth-century medical science in Britain was fundamentally about teaching. The classroom was the space in which anatomists’ careers were made, their audiences built, their research conducted, their work published, and, centrally, their pedagogical practices developed. Overlooking the classroom and pedagogy in favor of the separate spaces that characterize modern medicine—the lab, the clinic, and the journal—is to overlook much of what was important to early nineteenth-century Britons. This book restores the classroom and its associated activities to their rightful place at the center, tracing the emergence of a reformist pedagogical program through Bell’s classroom-based research and teaching endeavors.