Gender differences in the licensing and practice of female and male surgeons in early modern England.

This paper will examine differences in the roles played in the practice of surgery by males and females associated with the Barber-Surgeons Company in seventeenth-century London. It will also look at the ecclesiastical licensing process as it related to the licensing of male and female surgeons.1 The evidence will show that gender differences in both the guild and ecclesiastical routes to becoming a surgeon ensured that relatively few women obtained "official" standing as surgeons in the seventeenth century.2 Moreover, although female surgeons who obtained licences might demonstrate a higher degree of empirical success than many of their male counterparts, they generally carried out their work within circumscribed limits not imposed upon male surgeons. Aside from a substantial and motley assortment of unlicensed practitioners, a tripartite division of licensed medical practitioners provided health care in early modem England: physicians, for the most part university educated, surgeons, most commonly trained by apprenticeship, and apothecaries, also the products of apprenticeship. An informal medical hierarchy existed which placed physicians at the top of the ladder and apothecaries at the bottom, with surgeons somewhere in between.3 Although barbers, as