ABSTRACT
In the course of the period 1400 to 1700 medicine in most parts of western and central Europe became a corporate profession. Theoretically, practitioners were divided into three groups: physicians, surgeons and apothecaries. The first were learned doctors with degrees, trained in the medical faculties of Europe, who had a monopoly of diagnosis and prescription; the second and third were their subordinates, master artisans who carried out their orders, treating lesions and preparing and administering drugs, and were trained on the job. In reality, medical practice was always much more of a free for all. Learned physicians seldom went into the countryside where most of the population lived, so that surgeons and apothecaries frequently doubled up as general practitioners, while all three branches of the medical community suffered perpetual and sometimes intense competition from untrained part-time healers, quacks and charlatans. Nonetheless, by the end of the seventeenth century the distinction between legal and illegal medical practice was clear cut. In virtually every major city of continental Europe there was a corporation of physicians with the power in law to supervise and control medical services in the immediate vicinity, while even the smallest towns had guilds of surgeons and apothecaries who closely guarded their field of practice against interlopers (trained or untrained). Only in the British Isles, where this corporative structure had failed to take root, was the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate medical practice largely theoretical. Even in Britain and Ireland, though, there were medical corporations in the three capital cities and Glasgow, even if to all intents and purposes they lost their monopoly rights from 1704, when the House of Lords ruled that the Royal College of Physicians in London could not stop members of the city’s Society of Apothecaries from practising physic.1
