ABSTRACT
Unlike the others in this volume, this chapter will examine opposition to the consolidating ‘orthodox’ medical profession and to those doctrines and practices associated with it. At the legal level, the consolidation climaxed with the 1858 Medical Act. The doctrines and practices centred on massive interventions directed, accurately or not, at particular parts or areas of the body. Those readers for whom the first sentence of this chapter remains abstract are referred to much of the rest of this book as well as to later on in this chapter. To ignore the opponents of orthodoxy is not merely to commit ‘enormous condescension’ towards them but also, more important, to suppress the very relationship of opposition, and thus to smother the light it can throw on what was being opposed. Even those historians who-from beyond the pale of this volume, surely-still insist on interrogating the past for pioneers of a more or less triumphally viewed modernity need to keep alive some curiosity as to what their heroes (and, exceptionally, heroines) were up against.
