In 1933, Mrs H. expressed her dismay that her husband was not recovering from typhoid. Sixteen years before the antibiotic chloramphenicol was found to successfully treat typhoid, Mrs H. could not understand why modern medicine was not capable of healing her husband. Bacteriology brought significant changes to the experience of diphtheria patients in hospital, and increasingly for people suffering from anthrax, but there was also considerable continuity in medical knowledge and practice. A short review of continuity and change in a range of contexts in various locations will consolidate the research presented in Bacteria in Britain, comparing the value of bacteriological technologies and knowledge in the hospital, the workplace and the community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But first, the conclusion addresses this volume's significant revision of the historiography of the laboratory and clinic.

Chapters 1 and 2 contribute to the historiography of the social history of medicine but also to wider themes in the writing of the history of Britain.