Historians have portrayed a tense relationship between physicians and surgeons diagnosing at the bedside and pathologists testing samples at the bench. Yet, the unpublished records of two English hospitals – St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge – tell a story of elite physicians who were enthusiastic about new diagnostic techniques carried out by specialist pathologists. Indeed, the comical epigraph for this chapter was published in Bart's hospital journal and represents just how routinely bacteriology was used for diagnosis at the hospital.

In order to understand the contradictory representations of the interactions between elite physicians in the clinic and the laboratory, this chapter analyses a variety of sources created in the course of everyday administration and care for patients within two hospitals. Use of bacteriological diagnosis at Bart's, the oldest continually open hospital in England, established in 1123, is compared with Addenbrooke's Hospital, which was opened to the public in 1766 as a voluntary hospital funded by a legacy from Dr John Addenbrooke, and increasingly developed links to the University of Cambridge.