For the nineteenth century the history of English medicine has long since ceased to be written as though it were simply the annals of heroic doctors and epoch-making breakthroughs. That old warhorse, the epic of medical progress, featuring The Revolution in Victorian Medicine and the consequent deliverance (as two recent popular books put it) from The Age of Agony to The Age of Miracles, has for some time now been comprehensively challenged by a variety of alternative ways of seeing.

For example, complementing Ackerknecht's work, the late Michel Foucault argued that The Birth of the Clinic spelt a revolution in ‘medical gaze’, with the new normative and technological order of the hospital entailing fresh diagnostic epistemologies and disease representations, all generating vast medical power. Paralleling and to some degree overlapping with Foucault, many medical sociologists have trained their spotlight on professionalization as the great dynamo of medical transformation. Their timely attention to professional ambitions further reminds us that the Victorian age saw the rise of the public health movement, and other critical encounters in medicine's equivocal relations with the state; and this in turn has implications for what one school of investigators has dubbed the ‘medicalization of life’ – a concept often linked with polemical exposés of the ‘disabling professions’ and ‘the expropriation of health’, and with a radical desire to demystify medicine's allegedly hegemonic role as a secular and naturalizing instrument of ‘social control’. Of course, as ‘medicalization’ proceeded and orthodoxy sandbagged its citadel in the Victorian age, ‘alternative’ medical therapies became steadily more marginalized; and awareness of this polarization has informed recent explorations of radical and plebeian medicine.