The reform of the College of Surgeons.

  • Mackenzie, Morell, 1837-1892.
Date:
[1890]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The reform of the College of Surgeons. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    land, nor was its career particularly brilliant. After mucb mis- management and irregularities of various kinds, it came to an end by a deliberate violation of its own Act of Incorporation, wkicb required that no Court should be held unless tbe Master and the two Governors, or any two of them, should be present. Now it happened that shortly before the meeting of the Court of Assis- tants, held on July 7th, 1796, one of the Governors had died, whilst the other, John Wyatt by name, was living in Warwick- shire, blind and paralysed. Great efforts were made to have the poor old man brought up to London, and tradition says he was dragged for a considerable part of the way in a post-chaise, but in spite of all he did not arrive in time, and notwithstanding the absence of both the Governors, the Court was held on July 7th—an illegal proceeding, by which the Company was declared to have infringed the Act of Incorporation, and, so to speak, snuffed itself out. In the following year an attempt was made by eleven members of the governing body to induce Parliament to grant an Act of Indemnity, and thus to restore the Corporation under the name of a College to more active conditions of life. The Bill, which was ingeniously drawn so as to give almost absolute power to the governing body, had very nearly been smuggled through Parliament before the members of the Corporation were aware of what was going on, but on learning the state of affairs they at once petitioned against the Bill. These eleven Assistants might have attained their ends, owing to their unedifying official record not being generally known, but as Johnson said of some plausible rogue, they were undone “ as soon as their character came up with them.” Lord Thurlow championed the cause of the Members in the House of Lords, and the Bill, which had been on the point of being read a third time, was thrown out without a division.1 So scandalous were the dis- closures which had been made, and so strong had the opposition become, that the Court of Assistants never again summoned up courage to apply to Parliament. The ingenious idea of obtaining by Charter new privileges which had been refused by the House of Lords occurred to one of the Assistants ; and the amiable monarch, who could not have had any idea of the selfish designs of the Assistants, granted a Charter which practically deprived the Members of all vestige of their rights. It was thus that in March, 1800, after a good deal of intrigue, the governing body of the old Company of Surgeons obtained a new Charter, in the preamble of which it is said, “ Whereas we are informed that the old Company hath been and now is dissolved,” &c., &c. It is contended that this recital is incorrect, and that the Charter of George III. had no power to override an Act of Parlia- (1) Parliamentary Register of the House of Lords. London, 1797.