Fiona Haslam Liverpool University Press, £39.99, pp 336 ISBN 0 85323 640 5

A country of extremes of wealth and poverty, of the educated and the ignorant, where politicians in government and opposition are derided, and where much medical advice is given by alternative practitioners to a gullible population. A land where the poor live many years fewer than the rich, the homeless beg in the streets, and the royal family patronises the alternative sector of health care. An age of “lechery, intoxication, vanity, hypocrisy and lack of compassion,” where “all classes of society, including members of the nobility… impressed by the outward trappings of pseudoscientific knowledge and respectability… were prepared to expose themselves to the dangers associated with quackery.” Alcohol produced “idleness, poverty, misery and distress… …