The oldest medical societies in Great Britain.

IN 1949 Thornton published the most complete list that is available of the years of formation of the medical societies in Great Britain. The list also included other medical institutions in Britain and the more important societies and institutions of other countries. Thornton acknowledged that his list was incomplete in 1949, and since then further information has become available concerning some of the early medical societies. No accurate chronological list exists of the years in which the earliest of the existing medical societies in Britain were founded in spite of the interest which the subject arouses among medical men. Claims are made for individual societies that they are 'among the oldest in the country' or erroneous claims that a particular society is the 'oldest'. For these reasons an attempt has been made to provide a chronological list of the early existing medical societies, limiting it to those which were founded prior to 1850. Doctors have an instinctive concern for records and their preservation and this would seem to explain why the original minute books of so many early medical societies have survived to the present day. This enables an accurate date to be given to the year of formation of most of the early medical societies. Sometimes this is difficult when the early records have been lost or when the society started from a group of medical men holding informal meetings among themselves, and it is uncertain when the formal society which evolved was actually founded. In this situation it is usually found that a society reviews the available evidence and decides upon a given year for the date of its formation. Greater difficulty in compiling an accurate chronological list is encountered from the fact that many provincial medical societies evolved from medical book clubs (Bishop, 1957) and that some medical societies date their foundation from the year of formation of the book club from which they evolved and others from the date of formation of the medical society proper. It has been felt in this study that the date of formation of a medical society can only be that claimed by the society concerned. But in view of the absence of a uniform method of dating the formation of medical societies, information will be given as to how the date has been decided when it is not the formal date of an existing medical society. Information on the dates of foundation of the early medical societies has been obtained from a number of sources. In addition to Thornton's study (1949, 1966), Bishop (1950) published an essay on medical societies, and the subject was one on which Rolleston was an acknowledged authority and wrote a number of papers (e.g. Rolleston, 1930). In 1939 Power published a volume on the histories of thirtysix medical societies by various authors and of which sixteen were early societies included in this study. The dates of foundation of a number of early medical societies are given in the reference volume on Scientific and Learned Societies of Great Britain (1964) and the histories of a number of societies have been published as monographs or in medical journals. In the absence of a published account of a medical society,