The Social Status Of The London Surgeon, 1350-1450

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the growing number of untrained practitioners between the years 1350 and 1450. In response to this threat, medieval surgeons attempted to institutionalize their profession. Ironically, the manner in which they defined their practice did not restrict untrained practitioners, but actually increased access for medically untrained artisans.
In Medical Practitioners in Medieval England, C. H. Talbot and E. A. Hammond collect biographical data on medical practitioners from the Anglo-Saxon period to William Munk's 1518 Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London. As Talbot and Hammond state,
Among the problems encountered in the preparation of this register none has been greater than the sheer bulk and variety of materials which had to be examined. Every charter witness, lay subsidy role, chancery and exchequer record, household account, monastic chronicle, bishop's register, municipal ordinance, parliamentary roll had to be considered a potential source of biographical ...

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available to the citizens of London during this period. This is only the number of practitioners visible to the historian in historical documents. Furthermore, while these numbers seem small, they are consistent with two similar studies on the number of medical practitioners in fourteenth-century Europe. Christian Guillere's 1985 study of the city of Garonne between 1320 and 1370 finds numbers of documented medical practitioners as low as 14 in 1370 and as high as 29 in 1340.6 And Michael R. McVaugh in Medicine Before the Plague finds in Barcelona 35 physicians and 33 surgeons between 1300 and 1340 and similiar numbers in Valencia.7

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