ABSTRACT
Hippocrates himself lived in the fifth century BC in the so-called Golden Age of Greece. For a millennium neither Rome nor Christianity was prepared to adopt ideas of experimental science, nevertheless the prescriptions if not the methods of Galen took hold. Hippocrates and Galen had developed their medicine by observation. For some disorders, relief is sought from medicine, for others, from topical applications. The first description belongs to the physician and apothecary, the second to the surgeon. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, medicine in all its branches was substantially unregulated outside London. The Amendment Act of 1886 provided for all practitioners to be qualified in the then three branches of practice, namely, medicine, surgery, and midwifery. With the advance of technical medicine and with the growth in collective consciousness there was, as we have seen, a consequent growth in the social status of doctors.
