This book offers the first full-length study of medical education at the University of Cambridge for nearly 70 years. Drawing on the extensive records in the university archives and contemporary periodical literature, it sets the development of the Cambridge medical school in the context of the history of medicine, science and higher education. The author begins with the preservation of the faculty in the face of early nineteenth-century attacks on privilege in medicine and higher education, presenting a detailed investigation of the reforms of the 1860s and 1870s which led to the creation of the laboratories in the experimental sciences such as physiology and pathology on which so much of the University's twentieth-century reputation was to rest, and of a clinical school which faded quickly and was soon forgotten. The second half describes the evolution of this reformed faculty into the model of academic medicine that we recognise and follow today. Nor are the students forgotten: their experiences of medical education at the University are illustrated with numerous quotations from periodicals such as Granta and the Magazine of the Cambridge University Medical Society.
Dr MARK WEATHERALL was at Cambridge from 1986 to 1997, and held a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship for the year 1994-5; he is currently a SHD at the Whittington Hospital, North London.