English Medical Licensing in the Early Seventeenth Century

In the middle ages when every craft had its gild with an elaborate organization and code of conduct, medicine was singularly lacking in any such control and its members lacked a corporate spirit or feeling of group consciousness. Moreover physicians had no control except that which the universities provided as part of their training. In this respect medicine was unlike tihe Church and the legal profession, each of which in the middle ages had established itself as a distinct group with a strong corporate spirit. Throughout Europe the Church had expressed this spirit in the organization and hierarchy it had created to provide for its interests, and in England especially the law had developed along similar lines. Furthermore, both of them had very early provided training centers for their personnel in England, the Church at Oxford and Cambridge, and the law at the Inns of Court in London. Medicine, because it had not emerged as a strong and independent profession until toward the end of the middle ages, because it had not developed a corporate spirit, and because the philosophical nature of medicine precluded any special type of education, did not establish training centers for its personnel. And yet perhaps all the blame for such tardy development should not be laid directly at the door of medicine. One of the principal reasons for its slow development was quite likely the contemporary attitude of the laity toward health and disease. It must be remembered that the middle ages, like the patriarchs of Israel, regarded disease as a visitation from God which must be endured as a punishment for sin. Even as late as the middle of the seventeenth century, James Cooke, the editor of Shakespeare's son-in-law's case book, wrote: