Professionalizing Modern Medicine

?Toby Gelfand has written a noteworthy book. Although eighteenth-century French medicine has been studied from a number of perspectives ... not nearly enough attention has been paid to important medical institutions and the shifting of roles within the profession. In discussing the surgical profession in Paris from the mid-seventeenth century to the post-Revolutionary period, Gelfand has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of major developments in French medicine. He has also demonstrated very convincingly why commentraries on professionalization need to look beyond the British and American experience. ... Gelfand's study clarifies complex developments in eighteenth-century medicine. He has cut through the rhetoric of the long contestations endemic in French medicine of the period to get to the essential issues and we are all the wiser for his efforts.?-Bulletin of the History of Medicine