ABSTRACT
Steven Feierman (1979) has pointed out the similarities between Tudor and Stuart Britain and many parts of the twentieth-century Third World in terms of the variety of healers and healing knowledge available. This variety he refers to as a ‘plural healing system’, although to what extent these multifaceted arrangements amount to one ‘system’ is somewhat doubtful. He then presents the problem of how it should have come about that in less than three centuries from the end of that period biomedicine in Britain came to dominate over all other types of thought and practice about illness and healing. Biomedicine did not become the only healing system; many alternatives continued to exist (see Chapter 11), but biomedicine undoubtedly gained the most prestige, authority and economic power.
