Medically qualified naturopaths and the General Medical Council

Abstract

1858-1918) and Joseph Stenson Hooker (1853-1946) both obtained the licentiateship of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1879 and were duly entered on the Medical Register, Hooker having qualified LSA two years previously.In their practice of medicine both came to favour "natural healing" and both came into conflict with the medical establishment.In 1892 Allinson, aged 34, was brought before the General Medical Council (GMC) and found guilty of "infamous conduct in a professional respect": his name was erased from the Register.In 1925 Hooker, aged 72, was found guilty of the same offence and was also struck off the Register.Neither man considered his actions in any way discreditable, but it is not surprising that doctors who supported natural healing, otherwise known as "nature cure" or "naturopathy", should fall foul of their professional brethren.Naturopathy, though it embraced many familiar and generally acceptable hygienic principles, differed radically from orthodox medicine in its concept of disease and the consequent requirements of therapy, notably in its condemnation of treatment with drugs.Its social and professional attitudes also differed substantially from those of medical orthodoxy.'In this paper, the careers of Allinson and Stenson Hooker will first be traced to illustrate the professional problems of registered practitioners who came to embrace heterodox views.Allinson rebelled against medical authority early in his career and seems to have followed the tradition of nineteenth-century health reform.Hooker developed his unorthodox views much later and, it will be argued, was one of a group of older doctors who were actively deviating from the direction being taken by "scientific medicine" as it entered the twentieth century.Members of this group rejected many of the basic concepts of orthodox medicine, such as the germ theory, and some subscribed to the whole package of beliefs characteristic of naturopathy.Like Allinson and Hooker, they too were liable to come into conflict with the GMC.Study of these deviant practitioners necessarily reveals some of the characteristics of the profession from which they were ejected, particularly how it defined its boundaries.The Medical Act of 1858 had required the GMC to maintain the Medical Register of appropriately qualified doctors: registration confirmed a practitioner's

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