ABSTRACT
In France the state, the law, and the medical corporations played important parts from early times in determining the fate of irregular medicine. Most of the best social history or historical sociology of medical developments since the Industrial Revolution has looked at the operation of professionalisation and modernisation within orthodox medicine; and people have admirable studies, for example, of the tensions between physicians and apothecaries or the relations between the profession and Parliament. In England, the state never outlawed fringe medical practices, and the ultimate arbiter remained to a much larger degree the public. In a similar way, Virginia Smith argues that medicine on all rungs of the ladder has been preoccupied with shared concerns: with cleanliness, temperance, moderation, hygiene, dietetics, bathing and so forth. In some ages, in some health-care systems, they have been true-blue orthodoxy. In England, the state never outlawed fringe medical practices, and the ultimate arbiter remained to a much larger degree the public.
