ABSTRACT
This chapter explains general practitioners (GP) training hopes to convey a sense of the modern hurdles that must be jumped to gain entry into the increasingly competitive training programmes. GPs are personal doctors, primarily responsible for the provision of comprehensive and continuing medical care to patients irrespective of age, sex and illness. In the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, there were few courses that GPs could attend in order to maintain their knowledge; some doctors even booked locums so that they could spend a couple of weeks attached to a hospital. The role of the GP emerged as an amalgamation of the skills of the apothecaries, who prescribed medicines and had to belong to a register from the early 19th century onwards; and the barber surgeons who were very ‘hands on’, sometimes with a saw. General practice in the latter half of the 20th Century prided itself on the fact that ‘generalism’ was a ‘specialism.’
