The dispensation. General practice in the United Kingdom between 1950 and 1980 was a realisation of Ruskin’s great dream in Fors Clavigera, the series of jeremiads he addressed to British workmen in the 1870s—a vision of a heaven of handicrafts. A very mid-twentieth-century esteem for scientific language and values might have ousted the trades-guild medievalism that appealed so much to Ruskin, but in other respects doctors and nurses continued to uphold a British sense of social life as pantomime—which is to theatrical life what ritual is to church life (as illustrated in those once popular Doctor in the House comedies…