ABSTRACT
In the age of reform, one of the institutions thought ripest for reformation was medicine. Endless meetings were addressed and pamphlets published promoting that cause, and the ensuing modernization of medicine has generally been seen as a self-evidently good thing.1 After all, was not the old order vitiated by closed, oligarchic corporations, the decay of medical education, whether at Oxbridge or in the antiquated apprenticeship system for training common practitioners, by a paucity of qualified doctors, and certainly by a lack of skillwhile all the time the toadstool millionaires were left to multiply unchecked? By contrast, the new order the reformers eventually succeeded in building was graced by more meritocratic colleges, the emergence of the family doctor, the parliamentary enforcement of minimum entry requirements, the marginalization of the unqualified, the establishment of the Medical Register and the General Medical Council, and the brisk new professionalism of the British Medical Association, the British Medical Journal, and the Lancet: improvement all round.
