The search for legitimacy: universities, medical licensing bodies and governance in Glasgow and Edinburgh from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries*

This chapter hopes to appraise the standpoints of universities and medical licensing bodies in Glasgow and Edinburgh, especially their changing attitudes to lay input from their urban areas. It also aims to show that medical academics and medical licensing bodies' continued legitimacy rested on these broader links as well as on public perceptions of specialist legitimacy. The increasing prestige of Glasgow and Edinburgh medicine, to which these élite-lay interactions contributed, was also reflected in Scottish, British and imperial contexts. The medical professionals working in the universities and licensing bodies provided additional medical services to their cities more generally. In Edinburgh, John Thomson, who lectured on the eye as a surgical professor, established an eye dispensary in 1824.45 In Glasgow, William MacKenzie lectured at the university and founded the eye infirmary in the city by the 1820s. Overall the incorporated structures and legal links at Edinburgh did not stop the disputes over autonomy which were also seen in Glasgow.