List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams; 1. Laboratories, medicine and public life in Germany, 1830-1849: ideological roots of the institutional revolution Timothy Lenoir; 2. Building institutes for physiology in Prussia, 1836-1846: contexts, interests and rhetoric Richard L. Kremer; 3. The fall and rise of professional mystery: epistemology, authority and the emergence of laboratory medicine in nineteenth-century America John Harley Warner; 4. Anaesthetics, ethics and aesthetics; vivisection in the late nineteenth-century British laboratory Stewart Richards; 5. Scientific elites and laboratory organisation in fin de siècle Paris and Berlin: the Pasteur Institute and Robert Koch's Institute for Infectious Diseases compared Paul Weindling; 6. French military epidemiology and the limits of the laboratory: the case of Louis-Félix-Achille Kelsch Michael A. Osborne; 7. Transforming plague: the laboratory and the identity of infectious disease Andrew Cunningham; 8. The laboratory as business: Sir Almroth Wright's vaccine programme and the construction of penicillin Wai Chen; 9. The costly ghastly kitchen Bruno Latour; 10. The laboratory revolution in medicine as rhetorical and aesthetic accomplishment Nicholas Jardine; 11. Gendered reflexions on the laboratory in medicine Hilary Rose; Index.