Cambridge and its contribution to medicine : proceedings of the Seventh British Congress on the History of Medicine, University of Cambridge, 10-13 September, 1969 / edited by Arthur Rook.

  • British Congress on the History of Medicine 1969 : University of Cambridge)
Date:
1971
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Cambridge and its contribution to medicine : proceedings of the Seventh British Congress on the History of Medicine, University of Cambridge, 10-13 September, 1969 / edited by Arthur Rook. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Medical Education in Cambridge before 1600 by A. H. T. ROBB-SMITH Sir Humphry Rolleston 1 once wrote that the history of the Cambridge medical school presents two distinct phases—a long period of somnolence like that of a newborn infant, followed in the nineteenth century and after by a stage of progressive growth. I believe this is an over-simplified view of the contribution of Cambridge University to the development of English medicine, and Dr. Towers 2 has dispelled some of the illusions about the eighteenth century. The somnolence hypothesis, which applies to Oxford as well, supposed that there was no medical education worth the name at either university until the days of Acland and Haviland and that until that time would-be physicians, having taken their M.A., went abroad for their training and doctorate, which they incorporated in their alma mater and so became eligible for the F.R.C.P. with its social and financial advantages. This is what Thomas Linacre, John Caius and William Harvey did ; but what about their intellectual equals, Robert Record, William Gilbert and Thomas Sydenham? In fact until about 1750, the sister universities were the only places offering medical education in the British Isles, for it was not until the eighteenth century that the Scottish universities were organized for the mass-production of doctors. Up to that date nearly three thousand physicians graduated at Oxford and Cambridge but only an eighth of these incorporated foreign degrees. Dr. Rook 3 has revealed that many excellent physicians graduated from Cambridge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but I will restrict myself to the 250 Cambridge doctors of the earlier