Deltoid - Inhofe: less honest than the Discovery Institute

Did someone say “history”?

Originally, a person who had attended a University and had taken a degree in medicine was referred to as a “physician”, “physic” meaning originally something like “material”, as in “not spiritual”. (Newton used it in the same sense.) Physicians diagnosed illness and prescribed for it, where “prescribed” means “laid down any course of treatment whatsoever”. They supervised the treatment and continued to consult without doing anything directly themselves, because they were scholars and (here’s the pitch) gentlemen - or at least, they wanted to be considered as such. Gentlemen did not actually work with their hands. Even mental work was a bit below them, and physicians were always a little sensitive on the subject. They didn’t want to be thought of as mere artisans. Hence the insistence on their academic title, which they even used socially, the only group of academics that did. (This is still the rule, incidentally.)

The courses of treatment they prescribed usually included specific diet, exercise and various other therapies. As a last resort - because it was intensely dangerous, not to mention painful - they also prescribed surgery, but of course they didn’t do that themselves. A chirugeon - a cutter - was called in to perform that function. Chirugeons were, as Stephen Maturin remarked, a respectable body, but they were tradesmen, not gentlemen. They didn’t have academic qualifications, and they learned their trade by apprenticeship. They barbered - which meant not only hairdressing, but also cutting warts, pulling teeth, chiropody, lancing boils, phlebotomy and the like, functions that were beneath the notice of physicians. “Chirugeon”, the Latin word, eventually was angicised as “surgeon”.

However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, this distinction was breaking down. As surgery became more effective and elaborate, surgeons began to train by formal study of anatomy, and eventually were qualified by degree in the Universities. Many of the latter retained the distinction between medicine and surgery by granting separate degrees, but reflected the new equality between the two by making them baccalaureates, while retaining the senior degree as a research or theory qualification. After 1830 the various governments established medical boards to examine and licence both physicians and surgeons, rather than leaving it to professional bodies or the Universities, and these boards accepted the new degrees. The result was that medical practitioners no longer qualified by doctoral degree, but the social convention of calling them “Doctor” remained.

Surgery became the cutting edge of medicine during the nineteenth century. Progress was palpably being made - anaethesia, then asepsis and antisepsis. The surgeons, revelling in their ability to actually do something, insisted on the distinction from physicians - previously injurious, now honourable. It was simply that status had changed foot. They still do that to this day, thus producing the ridiculous convention that a person qualifies in medicine, and is addressed as “Doctor” (a title to which he or she is not strictly qualified), and then specialises in surgery so as to revert to being merely “Mr”, “Ms” (etc).

It’s like the whale’s hipbones. Funny how history and biology sometimes intersect.