THE PERSONNEL AND PRACTICE OF MEDICINE IN TUDOR AND STUART ENGLAND: PART I. THE PROVINCES

Abstract

the preliminary training in Arts could be dispensed with.10Also it became more common to apply for University licences 'to practise medicine throughout England'.The exact nature of these licences is not clear, for at Cambridge they seemed to be a substitute for the M.B. degree whereas at Oxford they were often granted at the same time as the M.B., but there the time between the M.B. and a previous M.A. was greater;"' occasionally the licence was even taken with the M.D. and nearly always the applicant was already in practice.'2According to the Professor of Physic at Cambridge in I635 licenses had been granted indiscriminately before his time, even to serving men and apothe- caries. 3 It is on this point of the exact background of the men in Raach that a more detailed examination is required, for however illuminating, the list of eight hundred may be misleading.Firstly it needs to be demonstrated that the holders of degrees did really practise; some men, such as Miles Beveridge and John Browne, seem to be included merely on the strength of their possessing a degree.This is particularly true of the seventy-odd physicians listed for the cities ofOxford and Cambridge, for such a figure is quite disproportionate to the population.Others, such as William Denton and Thomas Jeesop, are included as country physicians, but in fact they merely retired to the countryside after long years of practice in London.'4It is unlikely that this qualification basically alters the picture presented by Raach but it could mean that there is an over- estimation of the extent to which country physicians were formally educated.The Bishop of Exeter, for example, had a list made in i665 of all practitioners ofphysic in his diocese, and there it can be seen that more than half (twenty-six out of forty-two) had no qualifications at all and at the most only eleven had degrees.'6Carew, in surveying the practice of medicine in Cornwall in I602, summed it up by saying, 'The most professors of that science [of physic] in this country, saving only one, J. Williams, can better vouch practice for their warrant, than warrant for their practice'.'6For this very reason of course, it is difficult to find the many obscure people who were practising, but a study of local records and wills, in Devon for example, would reveal many, such as Simon Kelway,'7John Nichollsl8 and John Periam' who might well have been expert, if empirical, physicians; Kelway, for example, wrote a book in English on treatment of the plague and included recipes for other common complaints and explanations of medical weights and measures.20The second qualification that needs to be made stems from the first and is more important for it leads us from a question of personnel to that of medical practice at this period.A directory of physicians implies that the term physician is a fairly distinct type of practitioner performing a function in medicine not carried out by the subordinate apothecaries or surgeons.This of course has usually been assumed to be so until the apothecary became a general practitioner some time after the Plague, and contemporary writers, such as Bullein2l and Oberndoerffer,22 and eminent physicians such as Harvey,23 all believed in such a hierarchical and differentiated professional structure.Thus there is no hint in the Directo?y that in fact some of the people listed were surgeons and apothecaries by training 364

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