The medical practitioners of provincial England in 1783.

Two hundred years ago, in September 1783, a London physician, Samuel Foart Simmons, published the third edition of his Medical Register,' an ambitious venture that began in April 1779, with his first attempt to list the qualified medical practitioners in Britain, her colonies, and much of Europe. However, this first edition suffered from substantial omissions, largely due to the failure of Simmons's correspondents to answer his questions by post, pithily noted by him in footnotes for parts of Surrey, of Lincolnshire, and in Norwich, for example.2 These omissions were made good by the 1783 edition, so presumably his tart comments were effective. Four years and one more edition later, in 1783, his Register had expanded very considerably in the sheer number of names but with fewer details about the individual practitioners, their publications, and the county hospitals established in the provinces. The 1783 edition, however, is an impressive work, arranged geographically by British counties. There are separate sections on the Royal Colleges of Physicians, the Corporation and Royal College of Surgeons, and the Society of Apothecaries, as well as details of contemporary medical societies and local scientific and learned bodies. The English provincial practitioners can be found scattered among these various lists as well as included in their own county directory. Thus much interesting data is obscured for modern researchers, since although Simmons provided a cumulative name index, as well as lists of deaths and an appendix of amendments, there is erratic cross-referencing and some names slip through unnoticed altogether. In 1779, Simmons made no attempt, with far fewer names, to provide an index, but by 1783 his new publisher, Joseph Johnson, undertook to supply the index and defray its cost. Simmons admitted that an index had been a "desideratum in the former Editions, which the Editors, from the apparent Laboriousness of the Undertaking, had been deterred from supplying". He added a comment in praise of the indexer, who had "executed it with a Degree of Accuracy which cannot fail to please the Purchasers of the Work". The purpose of this survey is to look in some detail at the English