Themselves Writ Large: The British Medical Association 1832–1966

Peter Bartrip BMJ Publishing Group, £29.95, pp 400 ISBN 0 7279 0998 3

In an address in 1959, the Duke of Edinburgh described the British Medical Association as an institutional expression of democracy. Peter Bartrip's informative and scholarly analysis of this contentious, volatile, and adaptive organisation largely bears out the duke's contention. Certainly, the BMA's founder, the midlands practitioner Charles Hastings, would have been comfortable with the conservative idea of power being immanent in voluntary institutions. Since the second world war, the organisation may be seen as a prime example of participatory, associational democracy. In an age of state supremacy, it has come …