The diary of Thomas Giordani Wright: apprentice doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne, 1824-29.

Thomas Giordani Wright (1808-98), a prosperous doctor in Wakefield for most of his working life, started his long medical career as apprentice to Mr James McIntyre, Surgeon, in Newcastle upon Tyne. During the last three years of his apprenticeship (1826-29), before leaving to become a student at London University, he wrote his Diary of a doctor.' The Diary, written not as a confidential and private journal, but rather as a report on the author's activities to be read "by family and friends", describes many aspects of his varied social life, including visits to the theatre, concerts, parties, dances and holidays. It also gives a detailed account of his work as a doctor. Although only eighteen years old when he began his Diary, and without any formal qualifications, Wright was already acting as an assistant in a busy medical practice. In this position he had responsibilities for his "own" patients, mainly coal miners and their families in villages around Newcastle. His Diary was used to record many of his cases and to comment in detail on the running of McIntyre's practice: the management, the organization of transport, the communication with patients, and the interactions between master, assistants and apprentices. As well as relating day-to-day events, Wright included sections, entitled 'My Autobiography', that describe his experiences up to the time he began his Diary: his youth in Stockton-on-Tees, his schooldays and some unhappy months indentured to a doctor in Darlington, his early experiences in Newcastle, and a winter session as a medical student in Edinburgh. 2 This article, which concentrates mainly on Thomas G Wright's medical experiences in Newcastle between October 1826 and April 1829, highlights the Diary as a detailed primary source of information about the training and work of a medical apprentice in a growing industrial town in the early nineteenth century.