ABSTRACT
The success of the medical practitioner in Early Modern England has done much to arouse and inform the professionalisation debate. This chapter shows that a broader approach to medicine in the early modern period reveals continuities which both enlarge the discussion as a whole and point to areas of neglect which have relevance to more recent periods in which professionalisation can be better defended as a full interpretation of historical events. In the nineteenth century, the guilds were idealised primarily in order to prove either that they were or that they were not precursors of trade unions. More recent commentators have stressed the decline of the guilds as an acceptable face of the ‘rise of capitalism’ hypothesis, and have adopted a similar line in distinguishing the professions as of higher status than the crafts, possessing an ideal of service, and exclusive of occupations purely commercial, agricultural and mechanical.
