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

Nonetheless he received the university‘s licence to practise based on his
attending lectures, studying anatomy with Willis and Lower and performing
dissections, post-mortems and animal experiments. 26 He was not the only
clergyman to practise medicine. From about 1630 to 1800, they took up
medicine either because they were dismissed from their living or were
interested in the subject. Pelling adds that some of the clergymen claimed
that poverty had persuaded them to take up medicine. 27 They were, in the
early days, amongst the few with any education 28 and obtained medical
knowledge by reading and collecting existing commonsense remedies. They
tended to term themselves physicians or doctors of physic and their arts
degree gave them a level of respect rather higher than that of the
apothecary. 29 Fraser expresses the same idea saying that rural clergy were
often expected to give their parishioners medical advice, particularly those
who were poor. 30 William Turner was a rather special example; born about
1610, he was both a clergyman and a physician. He studied physic in Italy
and divinity at Pembroke College, Cambridge and practised medicine
because of his interest in it. 31
Waddington believes that Oxford commenced teaching medicine in
the thirteenth century and copied the syllabus employed in Paris, whose
medical school pre-dated those at both Oxford and Cambridge. But even
26 Robb-Smith, „Medical Education at Oxford and Cambridge Prior to 1850‟, in Poynter, (ed.) The
Evolution of Medical Education in Britain, p. 37.
27 Pelling, Common Lot, p. 242.
28 W. Bonser, General Medical Practice in Anglo-Saxon England – Essays in Honour of Charles Singer
(Oxford, 1953), vol. 1, p. 154 et seq. quoted in L. Matthews, History of Pharmacy in Britain (Edinburgh
and London, 1962), p. 8, note 1.
29 Burnby, A Study of the English Apothecary from 1660 to 1760, p. 83.
30 Fraser, „William Stukeley and the Gout‟, 165.
31 Matthews, History of Pharmacy in Britain, p. 27.
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