ABSTRACT
The College’s attempts at defining both itself, and its opponents, in the wider world of London medicine involved a complex of meanings for public and private in which we can perhaps see the germs of the modern stress on privacy, itself an aspect of the hegemony of the middle class. In general, the case study of the London physicians demonstrates how the closest possible proximity to the project of professionalization – and, it may be argued, a prominent role in defining it – can nonetheless be associated with a movement from the proto-private towards the proto-public, as Habermas postulated, but of something like its opposite. The London College was explicit, first in its partial acceptance of contractual medicine, and then in its rejection of it. Women were allowed to work as sextons in London in the eighteenth century because this office was regarded as both private and menial.
