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

setting fractures and reducing dislocations, 110 but he was the ancestor of the
general practitioner we know today. In Robson‘s London Directory of 1854,
the title of apothecary only appears once in the first fifty pages; it had been
replaced by general practitioner. 111
A number of writers, Cope, Seligman and Loudon, mention that most
practitioners provided a midwifery service. 112 It was not a popular option
and frequently offered only because no one else in the locality was prepared
to do so. Its one advantage was that it helped to set up the practice and was
a means of keeping a whole family on his books. The problem was that it
was hard work and occupied a disproportionate amount of time for a small
fee. 113 Although many apothecaries contented themselves with such a life
style, others were interested in research, making considerable contributions
to chemistry, botany and medicine; among these Richard Poulteney,
Sylvanus Bevan and John Chandler were elected Fellows of the Royal
Society. 114 Others took an interest in local affairs and became mayors and
aldermen, a point made by both Burnby and Whittet. 115
The physicians, who tended to be concentrated in cities and large
towns, differed from the surgeon-apothecaries in terms of education, social
110 Loudon, „A Doctor‟s Cash Book‟, 264.
111 Burnby, A Study of the English Apothecary from 1660 to 1760, p. 25.
112 Z. Cope, „The Origin of the General Practitioner‟, Hist. Med., 5, 1973, 3 quoted in Burnby, A Study of
the English Apothecary from 1660 to 1760, p. 25, note 70 and S. Seligman, „The Royal Maternity
Charity: the first hundred years‟, Medical History, 24, (1980) 407 and Loudon, „The Nature of Provincial
Medical Practice in Eighteenth Century England‟, 27.
113 Loudon, „A Doctor‟s Cash Book‟, 265.
114 Burnby, A Study of the English Apothecary from 1660 to 1760, p. 89.
115 Burnby, A Study of the English Apothecary from 1660 to 1760, pp. 1 and 115 and T.D. Whittet,
„Apothecaries and their lodgers: their part in the development of science and of medicine‟, Journal of the
Royal Society of Medicine, Supplement no. 2, 76, (1983) 7.
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