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David Lloyd Roberts MRCS LSA MD FRCP FRS.Edin (1834–1920) was a successful Manchester doctor who made significant contributions to the advancement of gynaecology and obstetrics. His career was closely linked to the Manchester St Mary’s Hospital for Women and Children, 1858–1920. He lectured on midwifery at Owens College and the University of Manchester and was gynaecological surgeon to Manchester Royal Infirmary. He had many interests outside medicine, including a large collection of rare books, paintings and antiques. He produced an edition of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1898) and a paper, The Scientific Knowledge of Dante (1914). He donated his books to the John Rylands Library and the London Royal College of Physician, his paintings to the Manchester Art Gallery, and he left a large endowment to Bangor College, Wales. This article reviews his medical work alongside his legacy to literature, the arts and education.
Law and healing is a colourful and critical account of the longstanding ‘marriage’ between two fundamental pillars of human society, law and medicine. The book addresses medico-legal history, exploring aspects of English law’s fascinating and sometimes acrimonious relationship with healing and healers. It challenges assumptions that medical law is new and that when law engaged with medicine, judges deferred to the ‘medical man’. It traces the regulation of healing from the dominance of the Church, and goes on to examine how the battles between different groups of lay ‘doctors’, physicians, surgeons and apothecaries were fought out in the law courts, the Royal Court and Parliament. Malpractice litigation and predictions of malpractice crises are shown to date back to the fourteenth century. Evidence of judicial deference is scant until late in the nineteenth century. Medical law today addresses moral dilemmas arising in medical practice and biomedical science. Considering historical perceptions of the human body from the womb to the grave, this work identifies themes persisting through medico-legal history and how history repeats itself. The book assesses both how English law responded to changes in ‘scientific’ understanding of bodies and how ‘science’, or what was thought to be science, influenced law. Bizarre theories about biology are seen to buttress laws of primogeniture and legal incapacities imposed on married women. The book considers how in the nineteenth century medical practitioners gradually acquired a strong voice in law-making on morals as much as medical practice.
. Visitations by Catholic bishops from the 1750s, in the dioceses of Cashel and Cloyne and Ross, confirm that midwives were presented to the bishop and received instruction on the performance of baptism at the time of the visitation. This suggests that Irish midwives were subject to similar patterns of supervision as midwives in Britain and Europe. 15 In addition, the Journals of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland allow the historian to trace the obligation the College had to regulate midwifery as the field came to be
the College of Physicians to regulate the whole domain of medicine. The tripartite division of physician, surgeon and apothecary, clearly established in many European states, and the basis of Tudor legislation regulating medical practice, was far less clear in England. 1 Robert Kerrison, an apothecary campaigning for reform early in the nineteenth century, damned the
type – may now be found in these countries among the ranks of the medical profession! 1 In the same year, the Freeman’s Journal also commented that ‘the lady doctor is getting on. She has broken down the barrier of bigotry and exclusiveness and forced her way into the profession. She has now her recognised position and status, and is no longer, except amongst the particularly ill-conditioned, a theme for rude jests and jibes’.2 By this time, it had been twenty-one years since the historic decision of the King and Queen’s College of Physicians of Ireland (KQCPI) to
Royal College of Physicians in 58 H. F. Mulvey, Thomas Davis and Ireland: A Biographical Study (Washington, D. C., 2003), pp. 37–40. 59 Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford, 2000), pp. 49–54. ሉ Irish Enlightenment, human societies, and bodies ሊ 181 Dublin in that year that he began work on his Scale of Creatures.60 The Scale’s fifth chapter, its appendix, and some additional pages are now held in the British Library and were printed in 1927; a copy consisting of five chapters and an appendix held at Yale
indication of the number of apothecaries who practised in Dublin in the early years of the eighteenth century can be found in a petition dating from 1725. On 7 December in that year, a group of Dublin apothecaries placed a petition before the House of Commons against the heads of a bill to ‘prevent abuses in the practice of physic’. 6 The heads of this bill had been brought by the president and fellows of the King and Queen’s College of Physicians of Ireland (KQCPI), who were attempting to reform what they referred to as
, ‘it was a measure of how far behind London Ireland lagged’ that progress in the 1650s should consist solely in the establishment in Dublin of a College of Physicians in 1654 (not granted formal recognition until 1667), a belated attempt to create a regulatory body for medical practice that, like its London counterpart, aimed to preserve the monopolistic authority of graduate physicians. He adds, citing Charles Webster, that the disputes between the Galenists and chemical physicians, such a distinctive feature of English
remedies. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, female midwives licensed by the Church cared for birthing women and their babies. 14 1.6 Medical corporations Orthodox ‘doctors’ belonged to their own medical corporation, each one regulating its members and representing their interests. From 1518, the College of Physicians claimed to be the pre
category. Despite the totalising rhetoric of radicals and reformers it is clear that far from all practitioners felt bound to one another by the invisible bonds of professional identity. A poor-law surgeon or general practitioner in York may have embraced others of his ilk as brethren but it seems unlikely that the high-ranking members of the Royal College of Physicians felt quite the same degree of collective identification. Moreover, with the advent of female doctors and the increased technical and intellectual specialisation of the later nineteenth century, the