This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2015.27Neuropathologists constituted a small field in post-war England, perched between neurology, psychiatry, neurosurgery and pathology, but recognised as a discrete field of expertise. Despite this recognition, the success of the neighbouring fields of neurosurgery, psychosurgery and neurobiology, and the consultant status granted to pathologists in the National Health Service, neuropathologists struggled to stabilise their field. A discourse of skills, acquired and acquirable, became central to their attempts to situate the field in relation to surgeons' handicraft, physicians' diagnostic acumen and the technologies of the biological sciences.A Gates Cambridge Trust doctoral scholarship and doctoral funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council supported my research and writing up
