ABSTRACT
Social status and incomes were not dependent merely upon any measurable success. Before the opening of the nineteenth century, there were clear distinctions between the physicians, the surgeons, and the apothecaries. E. Freidson argues that critical elements of professional behaviour, including ethicality, vary not so much with training as with the working environment, because practitioners are part of the environment. In Britain, the medical profession did not begin to achieve the accoutrements of the gentleman's status until the Industrial Revolution was well advanced, until, that is, the second half of the nineteenth century. The Medical Acts have always entrusted the supervision of the medical advisors' conduct to a committee of the profession, for they know and appreciate better than anyone else the standards which responsible medical opinion demands of its own profession. Until 1969 the Medical Acts used the expression 'infamous or disgraceful conduct in a professional respect'.
