ABSTRACT
The English approach to medicine in the first half of the nineteenth century–and to a much lesser extent the Scottish approach also –combined an almost medieval respect for tradition with an excessive admiration for the manners and attainments of an eighteenth-century gentleman. The nursing staffs were for the most part taken off the streets; women who were uneducated, unskilled, poor, slovenly, and often more interested in alcohol than in their patients. Not surprisingly, it was a common complaint that food and medicine supplied for one patient found their way to another–or to no patient at all. Apprenticeship was by far the commonest road to qualification, especially in surgery, but in the second quarter of the century it was increasily supplemented by instruction in private medical schools and teaching hospitals, and by ‘walking the wards’. Pain in surgery being thus regrettably unavoidable, what the surgeon aimed to do was to limit its duration as far as possible.
