The rise of the English drugs industry: The role of Thomas Corbyn

Abstract

Revisionist scholarship over the last generation has immensely sharpened our understanding of medical politics. We no longer see the history of medicine as the straightforward increase of knowledge, science, and skill; or as the rise of colleges, universities, and hospitals, all representing the evolution ofa natural division ofmedical labour; or as the march, onwards and upwards, of professionalism. 1 Rather, thanks to the writings of Holloway, Waddington, and others, we now construe such issues as reform and professionalization as ideological footballs, kicked around by rival interest groups in endless and unresolved struggles to secure power, prestige, and livelihoods.2 But if medical politics has now, rightly, been spotlighted, the economics of medicine remains in the shadows. True, there have been some advances. The researches above all of Raach, Webster, and Pelling for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,3 of Burnby, Holmes, Lane, and Loudon for the eighteenth,4 and of Peterson5 for the Victorian age