View/Open - ARAN - National University of Ireland, Galway

which required incisions. 31 Apothecaries, the third estate of the medical profession,
were concerned with the dispensing of prescriptions written by physicians. 32 It was
this tripartite structure, in addition to the rise of unlicensed ‘quacks’ and druggists in
the period which resulted in great tensions within the medical profession. According
to a Dr. Barlow, writing as early as 1813:
…so strangely perverted and unharmonised has the whole medical profession
become in this country that it is impossible to conceive any change that could
be as productive of equal recriminations. The surgeon exclaims against the
apothecary, the physician answers both, the apothecary retorts and thus they
go on mutually exasperating each other by every vilifying epithet and
opprobrious insinuation until they have rendered life such a scene of heart-
burning animosity and contention, that the strongest feeling of every liberal
mind must be a desire to escape for ever from the profession and its
bickerings… 33
Thus the Medical Act was introduced in 1858 in an attempt to put an end to frictions
within the profession. The act established the General Medical Council of Medical
Registration and Education in order to distinguish qualified practitioners from
unqualified ones in addition to implementing the legal rights of the profession. 34 The
act stipulated that in order to appear on the newly established Medical Register,
listing all registered medical practitioners in the United Kingdom, a doctor had to
possess a licence or medical degree from one of the nineteen registered bodies in
Britain and Ireland. However, it failed to put an end to the rigid divisions within the
medical profession: rather, it replaced the old tripartite structure of the profession
with a new type of medical hierarchy of hospital consultants and general
practitioners. In the Victorian years, the various divisions within the medical
profession and the competition for patients that went along with these resulted in
31 Loudon, Medical care and the general practitioner, p.19.
32 Loudon, Medical care and the general practitioner, p.19.
33 Edward Barlow, ‘A disinterested physician’, Medical and Physical Journal, 30, (1813),
p.286 cited in: Loudon, Medical care and the general practitioner, p.131.
34 Mark Weatherall, ‘Making medicine scientific: empiricism, rationality and quackery in mid-
Victorian Britain’, Social History of Medicine, 9:2, (1996), pp.175-194, on p.176.
10