Remarks on medical organization and reform, (foreign and English) : with a supplement upon the medical reform question / by Edwin Lee.

Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on medical organization and reform, (foreign and English) : with a supplement upon the medical reform question / by Edwin Lee. 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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    do honour to the college itself, was sure to be rejected on the pre- tence that he was ' ignorant,' where in reality it was under a pri- vate bye-law which condemned him to exclusion before he entered the college-hall. It would be superfluous to dwell upon the in- justice of this proceeding, or to describe the feelings of a deserving man, who had been rejected, not only without any reasonable cause, but left with a cruel stain upon his reputation, calculated to ruin his hopes of professional advancement. The same principle was carried out at a later period, when the monopoly of practice could not be restricted to a select few, by the division of physicians into distinct grades of fellows and licentiates. By virtue of a bye-law, no person was qualified to become a fellow unless he had graduated at Oxford or Cambridge, which scarcely possess an apology for medical schools, to the complete exclusion of graduates of other universities, the most noted for medical science and education ; so that many physi- cians, graduates of Edinburgh and other non-privileged univer- sities, when desirous of practising in London, preferred taking a diploma in surgery, rather than submit to the implied degradation of acting upon a mere licence, or of voluntarily taking a position in which they must witness the annual arrival of two young men from the English universities, to be placed permanently over the heads of themselves and the whole community of physicians, to which as licentiates they belonged, whatever their age or experi- ence might be. * Young men, says the author of the Quarterly Eeview article, with the smallest possible amount of medical science, were at once admitted as fellows, while some of the most experi- enced and accomplished physicians remained in the ranks of the licentiates. Nor was this all; no regulation was thought to be necessary as to medical education,—the degree of M.D., which in itself means little or nothing, as there are universities where it may be purchased for a few pounds, with two years' residence at any university, being all that was required. The consequence was, that many were admitted as licentiates, and even as fellows, whose medical education was inferior to that of the apothecary. In fact, the chief opportunity of seeing practice, which most young * A Sketch of the Medical Monopolies, addressed to the Right Hon. Lord John Russell. By Jiimes Kennedy, M.R.S.L. 183().