7 - London hospital men and a medical community, 1760–1815

Summary

In the preface to their first volume of Medical Observations and Inquiries (1757), a “Society of Physicians in London” praised the publications of the Royal Society and the Parisian Academy of Sciences, yet noted that their scope “does not allow them to insert several things … calculated only for the improvement of physick.” Furthermore, the anonymous editor(s) continued, some

important cases … cannot decently be read in mixed company, and there are others, of the merits of which, physicians only can be adequate judges, and which would appear neither entertaining nor instructive to philosophers or mathematicians.

“Mixed company,” a phrase that evokes audiences of men and women, suggests that these physicians had extraordinary delicacy about presenting medical details to nonmedical men, unless prim ladies indeed visited the Royal Society meetings. Note how the physicians claimed to be the only “adequate judges” of their experiences. They could share the “entertaining” or “instructive” case with educated folk, but they were the appropriate interpreters of such matters of fact. Asserting their unique expertise had, of course, always marked medical practitioners, however much they negotiated their authority with patients and peers. So the editor(s) went on to explain the particular grounds for their valuable work:

The persons who formed this Society, were either such as had the care of hospitals, or were otherwise in some degree of repute in their profession; and consequently had frequent opportunities of making observations themselves, and of verifying, in the course of their practice, the discoveries of others. […]