A letter to the Right Hon. Sir George Grey, bart., M.P., on some of the social relations of the medical profession / by George Robinson.

Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the Right Hon. Sir George Grey, bart., M.P., on some of the social relations of the medical profession / by George Robinson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    an eminent provincial Surgeon in extensive general practice, and the date of my settlement in this Town as Physician, having included three years residence in London as Surgeon, and a connection, both as Student and Lecturer, with a metropolitan Medical School, followed shortly afterwards by the completion of a similar tie with a provincial School of Medicine. Having thus discharged a customary, but unpleasant, duty in prefacing the few following remarks by a brief reference to personal motives and qualifications, I shall, in the first instance, with your permission, glance rapidly and concisely at the history and present condition of the Medical Profession of this Kingdom, and then proceed to consider, in an impartial spirit, those mutual claims existing between it and the public, which, being based upon truth and justice, necessarily possess an identity of origin and objects. The establishment in England of a body of properly educated men as Medical Practitioners, dates from the period of the Refor- mation. In the Middle Ages the practice of Medicine, in its higher branches, was in the hands of the Monks, who, being restricted by their vows from personally shedding human blood, delegated to the Barber-Surgeons the performance of the few simple operations then in use. But as the suppression of the monasteries by King Henry the Eighth deprived the people of such Medical assistance as they had previously received from this source, we find the same monarch granting a charter to the Barber-Surgeons' Company of London, and thus advancing their social position, while he, at the same time, founded the London College of Physicians, and placed it under the guidance of Linacre and other eminent laymen. The secularization of the practice of Medicine, thus legally recognized, was soon followed by similar advantages to those which resulted to our national jurisprudence, from throwing open to laymen the highest offices of the law. Within a hundred years from the establishment of the College of Physicians, William Harvey, one of its members, gained for himself and country an undying reputation by the discovery of the Circulation of the Blood, an illustrious example which has been unceasingly and not unsuccessfully followed by his successors.