Introducing the Complexity of Educational Diversification

Peer reviewe

Beyond the university : higher education institutions across time and space

This chapter makes the case for a history of higher education institutions which looks beyond the university. Building on recent historiographical developments, it argues that the history of higher education must not be limited to the history of the university, an institution fixed in space and time, but must rather adopt a transnational and transhistorical approach. It also argues for a broader definition of “institution” which includes concepts, ideas, and practices which have become “institutionalized” alongside traditional understandings of institutions as sites with fixed locations and physical forms. Beginning with an exploration of higher education and learning across the globe in the ancient world, it goes on to study significant developments in higher education during the medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modern periods. While considerable attention is paid to the development of the university in Europe and around the world, the role and significance of other higher education institutions are stressed throughout. Particular weight is placed on the importance of learned societies and academies as sites of research development and training in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter concludes with reflections on the ways in which the prominence of the research university since the Second World War has shaped the writing of the history of higher education in recent years, most notably, the dominant position given to the university as institution. Potentially fruitful directions for future research are also discussed, in particular, the need to focus on alternative higher education institutions

The Medical Marketplace

In the mid-1980s, a number of Anglophone historians began to describe health care in early modern England as a ‘medical marketplace’ or ‘medical market’. These terms were foregrounded by several scholars more or less simultaneously. The opening chapter of Lucinda Beier’s 1984 Ph.D. thesis (published in 1987) was entitled ‘The Medical Marketplace’.1 In 1985, Roy Porter wrote of the premodern ‘medical market place’ ‘where physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries … melted into each other along a spectrum that included thousands who dispensed medicine full- or parttime’,2 and Irvine Loudon observed that one of the most important unresolved areas of eighteenth-century medicine was ‘the extent of the market for medical care and how that market was satisfied’.3 The following year Harold Cook’s Decline of the Old Medical Regime began with a chapter entitled ‘The Medical Marketplace’.4 This terminology was not confined to scholars working on the United Kingdom. Katherine Park’s Doctors and Medicine in Early Modern Florence (1985) contained an identically entitled chapter.5