

It was as a result of this difference in status, that the physicians were always addressed as Dr.
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The main reason for that was that until 1745 they were formally linked with barbers and had to get bodies from the graveyard to learn how to perform surgeries. The class of surgeons did not command as much respect from the society as the physicians did. Their work was to perform surgeries, cut open the chest, deal with fractures and everything that a physician could not perform. Their Members and Fellows from 1845 appear in the Medical Directory (see below).īarbers, Surgeons and Dentists Īfter the physicians, came the surgeons in the medical hierarchy. There is a separate Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, founded in 1681, another in Glasgow for both Physicians and Surgeons, founded in 1599, and another in Dublin for Physicians, founded in 1667. No printed work deals with the Licentiates after 1824 but from 1845 they can be found (with the Members) in the annual Medical Directory (see below). Additional volumes on the Fellows only, 1825-1983, have since been published. Biographies of the last two categories, 1518-1824, were collected by its librarian, William Munk, and printed as The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London (2nd edition, 3 vols., 1878). The Royal College of Physicians of London has, besides ordinary members, Licentiates and Fellows. Raach, A Directory of English Country Physicians 1602-1643 (1962). Early physicians working outside London may be found in John H. Of the 337 physicians in provincial towns in 1783, very few were members of the Royal College in London.

The Royal College of Physicians of London (of England from 1858) had been founded in 1518 and was supposed to have a monopoly in the giving of medical advice within a seven mile radius of the City of London and, from 1522, nationally, a monopoly that was challenged successfully by the apothecaries in 1703. They were called the physicians because they only administered drugs or physic." Their work was mainly confined to check the pulse and urine of the patients. They were not concerned with the external injuries, nor did they performed surgeries or set bones. "The class of doctors that commanded most prestige in 1800s was the physicians. There was much overlap and frequent disputes between the various representative bodies that developed. As already indicated, however, the situation was far more complicated than would appear from such a simple statement. Fifteen years earlier the 1841 Census had listed three times as many (33,339) as practising one or more branches of medicine.īy the middle of the 16th century there were, in broad terms, a very few physicians (mostly with a degree from Oxford or Cambridge) who diagnosed internal problems barbers who conducted minor surgery such as bloodletting and drawing teeth surgeons who carried out major surgery in the presence of a physician (both barbers and surgeons had generally been apprenticed) and apothecaries (also apprenticed) who sold drugs and sometimes treated patients.

Formal records of medical qualification are very limited and although there were many practitioners, they were used and accepted not because of any paper qualification but because of the service they offered.Īs late as 1856, of the 10,220 persons listed in the Medical Directory with some sort of qualification, only four per cent had a medical degree from an English university. Robert Dimsdale, for example, the first of eighteen 'doctors' in his family, and a barber at Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, was presented in 1629 for keeping an unlicensed alehouse and the following year was fined for trading as a grocer, not having been apprenticed. As the historian Margaret Pelling said about membership of the Barber-Surgeons' Company in London in the 17th century, many in that period were actually distillers, innkeepers, hosiers, colourers, pinmakers, hatpressers, musicians, dyers, perfumers, tallowchandlers and tailors. Its practitioners were mostly part-time, combining their work with a wide range of other activities. The practice of medicine in Great Britain was, compared with other countries, disorganised and uncontrolled until the middle of the 19th century.
