A Respectable Occupation: - University of Hertfordshire Research ...

elsewhere to advance their careers. 19 But there were other reasons; the
Scottish universities were less expensive than Oxford and Cambridge. They
were open to dissenters, and offered training of a high quality. 20 However,
the absence of a classical education meant that one could not become a
Fellow of the College of Physicians and benefit from the status and rich
patients that would follow. 21
The Oxford or Cambridge route was the one chosen by Anthony
Addington, who ―… studied medicine at Oxford gaining his MB in 1741 and
MD in 1744.‖ 22 William Stukeley on the other hand graduated from Corpus
Christi, Cambridge in 1709 and then studied at St Thomas‘s under Dr
Richard Mead. 23 Richard Meade had studied at Leiden and Padua prior to
gaining his MD at Oxford in 1707. 24 John Elliotson, son of a chemist and
druggist, trained first at Edinburgh and then at both St Thomas‘s and Guy‘s
Hospitals and became a Licentiate of the College of Physicians. On deciding
that he wished to become a Fellow, he attended Jesus College, Cambridge as
a fellow commoner, but as he did not read medicine there, the doctorate he
received must have been in classics. 25
John Ward was a clergyman who had taken up medicine. He had
taken his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1649, but had no medical degree.
19 Robb-Smith, „Medical Education at Oxford and Cambridge Prior to 1850‟, in Poynter, (ed.) The
Evolution of Medical Education in Britain, pp. 39-40.
20 W. Brockbank and F. Kenworthy, (eds.) The Diary of Richard Kay (1716-51) of Baldingstone, near
Bury (Manchester, 1968) quoted in D. Porter and R. Porter, Patients’ Progress: doctors and doctoring in
eighteenth century England (Cambridge, 1989), p. 21, note 19.
21 Robb-Smith, „Medical Education at Oxford and Cambridge Prior to 1850‟, in Poynter, (ed.) The
Evolution of Medical Education in Britain, p. 19.
22 K.J. Fraser, „William Stukeley and the Gout‟, Medical History, 36, (1992) 180, note 125.
23 J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the age of the enlightenment (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 159-63 quoted in
Fraser, „William Stukeley and the Gout‟, pp. 161-162, note 6.
24 Fraser, „William Stukeley and the Gout‟, pp. 164, note 27.
25 W.J. Reader, Professional Men: the rise of the professional classes in nineteenth-century England
(London, 1966), pp. 60-61.
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