Lecture 12
THE PROFESSIONS
Key Reading: Penny Corfield, Power and The Professions in Britain 1700-1850 (London, 1995), chaps. 1,2,7
1. Knowledge and Power
- `Mystery', demeanor and clothing
- Jargon and ethos
- Numbers:-c. 1700 Gregory King est'd 10,000 householders `in the Law', also 10,000 clerics (2,000 eminent, 8,000 lesser - & another 16,000 were 'Persons in the Sciences and Liberal Arts' - doctors c. 8,000 - probabaly an overestimate
2. Lawyers
- two legal traditions - England - law based on mixture of parliamentary statute and interprettive case law
- Scots law - based on Roman civil law as modified by Eng. case law
- Sir Matthew Hale -The History of the Common Law & Analysis of the Law 1713
- superseded by Sir William Blackstone's 4 vol. Commentaries
- 1756-9 - set out Engl's common law as a set of principles
- barristers
- attorneys
- Act of 1733 - all proceedings in England's law courts & Scotland's Exchequer courts to be conducted & recorded in English rather than law-Latin
- attornies in central law courts and regional courts - 1729-31 - 10,183 enrolled - but some enrolled for two or more courts c. 5,500-6,000 in the lower branch of the law in early 1730s
- `Law Society'.
- Judges
3. Doctors
- Medical dress
- Character
- Collective Identity - Portraiture
- Jenner
- William and John Hunter
- Man Midwifery
- Surgeons
- Hierarchy: Physicians
- Surgeons
- Apothecaries
- Dissection: Act of 1752
- Anatomy Act of 1832
- Expansion of healthcare
- Medical schools
- 1726 - Edinburgh University - School of Medicine founded
- England: private medical schools - foundation of great teaching hospitals - 1746-83 - William Hunter ran famous Great Windmill Street School for anatomy and dissection
- Famous hospitals founded in the 18th Century: - The Westminster -1720, Guy's- 1724, St. George's - 1783 - the London- 1740, the Middlesex, 1745 - the Lying-In Hospital and the Rotunda in Dublin, 1745 & 1757, Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge 1766, Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford - 1770
4. Trends
- Earnings of professions
- Status and Ethos