The history of the medical profession: aims and methods.

IN REcENT years the study of medical history has been very active in England. Not only medical historians have contributed to it but others whose interest is in more general social history. There have been biographies and valuable new biographical works of reference. One after another, great medical institutions have found their historians: the hospitals, the London corporations, and one of those national institutions which provide their own medical services, the navy. Charity and charitable institutions have been studied with a new thoroughness and insight. For some periods we have learnt much about medical education and about the recruiting of the different branches of the profession. Statisticians have tried to discover from the census returns how the numbers and geographical distribution of the medical men were related to the economic development of the country. So in monographs and articles, and a few major books, materials are accumulating from which we can now begin to piece together the outline of something we have never possessed, a history of the medical profession in its various branches. We are not yet in a position to generalize safely at a serious academic level about the activities of the many thousands of men and women who have belonged to the profession. There is still much to be done on the lines which are appropriate to the early stages of a new historical enquiry, that is by looking into separate subjects each of which disposes of a compact and accessible body of unexplored source-material. It is not by accident that we have so many biographies based on personal papers and so many histories of institutions based on their records. Two illustrations may show that much work of this kind remains to be done and can easily be taken in hand. The first example concerns what is sometimes known, not at all appropriately, as the rank and ifie of the profession. From 1710 to 1803 an Act of Parliament' was in force which imposed a tax on all apprentices. The registers of the money so received contain a mass of facts about apprentices, their parents and their masters in all vocations all over the country. Two local record societies have published well-edited volumes dug from this mine.2 They give us definite dates and facts about the careers of some dozens ofsurgeons and nearly twice as many apothecaries in Surrey and Wiltshire. They even tell us something about two physicians: John Standfield of Devizes apprenticed his son to a London surgeon in 1711; William Blizard of Lambeth in 1719/20 actually took an apprentice himself. At least two other local societies intend to publish similar books, and, as one of them is the London society, we may expect a very useful supplement to our knowledge of eighteenth-century practitioners in London. A study of the medical entries in the manuscript registers for all the counties and boroughs