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

wide range of non-related goods: from groceries to books and oils to
ironmongery. 77 They were, at this stage, a long way from achieving
professional status.
Some aristocratic women also took responsibility for treating the
members of their household, estate workers and neighbouring families. In
the absence of a local doctor, the lady of the manor would provide a medical
service for the village. 78 Finally and at the furthest extreme of the medical
spectrum were the quacks who, in the main, had no knowledge of medicine
and tended to be untrained deceitful empiricists. 79 Nonetheless, the doctors,
the apothecaries, the chemists and druggists and the quacks all prescribed
the same herbal remedies, the only difference between them was the class of
person they were treating, the doctors‘ university education and the cost. 80
Lawrence supports this by saying that, from 1700 to 1815, the difference
between quacks and regulars was not as sharply drawn as the medical men
would have had us believe. What was important was length of experience
and a reputation for competence among one's patients, rather than a
university degree or a professional body's licence. 81 The patient‘s social
class did not dictate their choice of practitioners; people from every class
77
S.W.F. Holloway, „Professional Business: the achievements of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society since
1841‟, Pharmaceutical Journal, 264, 7077, (2000) 16.
78
Wyman, „The Surgeoness‟, p. 23.
79
Digby, Making a Medical Living, p. 27.
80
Sturgess, „Quackery: a barely believable history‟, 795.
81
I. Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 1750-1850 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 11-28; R.
Porter, Health for Sale: quackery in England 1660-1850 (Manchester, 1989), pp. 1-15; Fissell, Patients,
Power and the Poor in Eighteenth Century Bristol in Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge, pp. 74-75, note 3
and O. Davies, „Female Healers in Nineteenth Century England‟, in N. Goose, Women’s Work in
Industrial England Regional and Local Perspectives (Hatfield, 2007), p. 246.
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