ABSTRACT
The literature on professionalization in the health arena has focused on bourgeois medicine and its allied or auxiliary professions, and little attention has been given to alternative or heterodox practices. Harries-Jenkins asserts that professionalization has escaped definition due to "the concomitant failure to define 'professional' or to delineate 'profession'". Social scientists thus construct an ideal type which is used as a measure of the degree of professionalization achieved by different occupational groups. The professionalization of an occupation depends on its appeal to strategic elites in the larger society. The most important figure linking osteopathy in Britain and America was John Martin Littlejohn. By the 1920s practitioners trained in American schools, and others trained in osteopathy as apprentices or by self-instruction, were practicing in Britain. British osteopaths have attempted to obtain legitimacy in the eyes of both the state and the public by claiming to be a complementary system of medicine.
