Metropolitan medicine and the man-midwife: the early life and letters of Charles Locock.

Charles Locock and his times CHARLES later Sir Charles Locock (1799-1875), the son of a Northampton physician, aspired early to his father's profession. His wish, however, was soon to combine this conventional aspiration with the incipient specialist's role that, in bare outline, was taking shape in the 1820s and 1830s.' Buttressing this view of Locock, and spanning more than two decades of his early manhood, twenty of his letters to a Welsh friend have recently come to light.2 They provide an intriguing view of late Georgian English medicine as it was practised in the metropolis, and as it was perceived by a member of the small, cohesive community of medical students bound for the elite. Locock and most of his fellow students, though apparently not Richard Jones, his faitiful correspondent, would become the consultants and medical opinion leaders of early Victorian London.3 Locock himself, after an apprenticeship in medicine at St. George's Hospital, followed many of his compatriots to Edinburgh. In 1821, on receiving the Edinburgh M.D., he returned to London in pursuit of the enlarged advantage it afforded those possessed of wit and manners. Endowed with a measure of both, he rose rapidly in the medical hierarchy in the years between 1825 and 1835. By the late 1830s, Charles Locock was physician-accoucheur to the queen. A