This book provides a historical narrative about Romania's modernization. It focuses on one group of the country's elites in the late nineteenth century, health professionals, and on the vision of a modern Romania that they constructed as they interacted with peasants and rural life. Doctors ventured out from the cities and became a familiar sight on the dusty country roads of Moldavia and Wallachia, for new health legislation required general practitioners (medicilor de plasa) to visit the villages in their districts twice every month. Some of them were motivated by charity, and others by...