Welsh Journals

complexities of relations between the media and the state in a terrorist war, and he spends much time describing the clashes between the government and the media in the wake of the Agreement. It is a pity that he does not theorize a little more deeply on the questions raised by, for example, the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fein and other such organizations which was introduced in October 1988. The question of whether or not the media provides the 'oxygen for terrorism', as the Cabinet claimed, would benefit from a working professional's point of view. Far too often it is debated in an abstract way; and the considerable pressures under which journalists work in Northern Ireland must make for an interesting and valuable contribution to the controversy. There is much to be said for Arwel Ellis Owen's claim that the Anglo- Irish Agreement paved the way for the IRA truce in August 1994. But his own account indicates that this outcome was not so obvious at the time, and his book ends on the sterile note struck in the Queen's Speech in 1988 that efforts to 'eradicate' terrorism would continue. Some discussion of the link between the events of 1985 and those of 1994-5 would have raised the conceptual level of the book. Still, anyone if there is anyone who regrets the interruption of the war fought for Ireland/Ulster should read his account and realize that, whatever frying-pan the British and Irish governments and the Nationalists and Unionists of Ulster may have jumped from, they have not, so far, landed in the fire. D. GEORGE BOYCE Swansea AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SOURCES FOR THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE IN SOUTH WALES. Edited by Ralph A. Griffiths and John E. Law. University of Wales, Swansea, 1995, obtainable from the Department of History. Pp. 53. £ 2.50 (including postage). Historians of medicine and health have only recently recognized the potential of the local and regional studies that have traditionally been the preserve of the local historian. They now accept that these in-depth examinations can locate medicine within its social context, and offer the best and perhaps the only way of surveying central/local relationships, examining the history of individual hospitals, assessing the status of doctors within local elites, and tracing the changing balance of statutory and voluntary provision. If historians of medicine have neglected local studies, they have also tended to underplay the history of their specialism