Recent years have seen a great deal of interest in the ways in which laboratory science was brought into clinical medicine in the twentieth century.'This is a study of two distinguished English physicians, Thomas Horder and Walter Langdon Brown, who had almost simultaneous and identical careers and were major figures in the introduction of some of the findings and practices of new laboratory sciences into clinical work.There are important similarities and differences in their responses to these sciences, especially over time.To explain these responses I refer to two rather different social orders or classes and the rather different ideologies associated with them which these men simultaneously inhabited.2One of these I deem patrician: the world of aristocracy, privilege, deference, tradition, genteel leisure pursuits, face-to-face social relations and charitable service.3The other was professional or meritocratic: the world of citizenship, rationally driven progress, impersonal social relations and expert opinion.4Of course, these orders are ideal types but distinguishing them serves a useful purpose.I suggest that while the imperatives for these men to introduce laboratory science into medicine came largely from the professional order, theform in which it was introduced was determined, to some extent, by the patrician world.The bulk of the study examines how, in the light of political, social and cultural change in the 1920s and 1930s, Horder and Brown, in rather different ways, modified their accounts of the sciences they had adopted before the Great War.Horder and Brown were born a year apart, came from similar backgrounds, studied medicine together, practised at the same hospital and for most of their lives lived near each other in the West End of London.How they related on a personal level I have been unable * Prof. Christopher Lawrence, The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine,
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