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The Royal College of Physicians of London and Its Support of the Parliamentary Cause in the English Civil War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

William Joseph Birken
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Extract

In the mélange of conflicting theories on the origins of the English Civil War, a number of English social groups have received scrupulous attention. Storms have brewed over the gentry, the aristocracy, and more recently, “the middle sort of people” in town and countryside. Even the rural peasantry, traditionally neglected by historians, have not been overlooked in the most recent debates. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the English professional classes although studies of the clerical and legal professions have been forthcoming of late. Perhaps worst served of all in the ongoing war of scholars has been the English medical profession. The recent historiography on English physicians and their relationship to the Civil War can be briefly summarized.

The little work that has been done on professional physicians revolves almost exclusively around the fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London. In 1964, in a distinguished history of the college, Sir George Clark suggested that the fellowship probably leaned to the royalist cause, but out of political expediency accommodated itself to the reality of parliament's power in the City of London. Referring to the events of 1642 and 1643, Clark wrote:

The College as a body could not have done anything for the King if it had wished to. In London this authority was ended and if the College was to perform its duties there it had no choice but to recognize the de facto rulers..

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Fall 1983 , pp. 47 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1983

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References

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10 On February 2, 1644, “Dr. John Craige” received £150 at Edinburgh through the warrant of the Parliamentary Committee for Compounding, Green, M.A.E. (ed), Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents 1643-1660, (London, 1889–1892), I, 779Google Scholar. In 1656, Dr. Alexander Ramsey was listed first among the Scottish physicians petitioning Oliver Cromwell for the establishment of a College of Physicians in Edinburgh, Comrie, John D., History of Scottish Medicine (Second edition; London, 1932), I, 267–68Google Scholar.

11 D.N.B.

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13 London, Royal College of Physicians, Annals, Book III, p. 429. (All references are to the typescript translation in the library of the college).

14 Ibid., p. 437.

15 Ibid., pp. 507-08.

16 Ibid., p. 508.

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18 D.N.B.

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24 In 1635, in a letter to Dr. Simeon Foxe, president of the College of Physicians, Dr. Ralph Winterton, Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge, suggested that the college petition Archbishop Laud for his assistance in the college's struggle with the surgeons and apothecaries. If the college were willing to cooperate with the archbishop, Winterton implied, Laud was more than willing to throw the weight of his influence against the apothecaries and surgeons. There is no record that the college-clerical alliance ever went further than Winterton's letter. The college seemed to prefer its known problems to the dubious benefits of an alliance with the archbishop. R.C.P., Annals, III, 424-27.

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26 The lawyer, John Selden, neatly summed up the legal limitations on royal control of the “Royal” College in an analogy with the church: “There's a great difference between head of the Church and supreme governor, as our canons call the King. Conceive it thus, there is in the Kingdom of England a college of physicians: the King is supreme governor of those but not head of them, nor president of the college nor the best physician”. Quoted in, Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation (New York, 1969), pp. 303–04Google Scholar.

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29 The degree lists compiled by Wood and Andrew Clark were used for Oxford, while that of John and J.A. Venn served for Cambridge. Medical degrees at both universities were also checked against the information on doctorates found in Raach, John, A Directory of English Country Physicians, 1603-1643 (London, 1962)Google Scholar. Excluding the Oxford inflation of 1642-43, the number of medical doctorates at both universities were remarkably similar.

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37 R.C.P., Annals, III, 112.

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39 Ibid., III, 242-43.

40 A notable example of the college's ready cooperation with parliament occurred in 1626, when it submitted a list of “papist” medical practitioners and apothecaries to a requesting parliamentary committee on religion. The London “papists” “were named without qualification by those present.” Ibid., 202.

41 Keevil, John J., “The training and practice of a London pathologist, 1637-1646,” British Medical Journal (July 28, 1951), p. 231Google Scholar.

42 For Micklethwaite (Clark's son-in-law), Paget, Goddard, and Drake, see the D.N.B.; for King and Regemorter, there is Birken, William, “Dr. John King (1614-1681) and Dr. Assuerus Regemorter (1615-165)”, Medical History 20 (July 1976): 276–295CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Trench, Edmund Trench, Some remarkable Passages in the Holy Life and Death of the late Reverend Mr. Edmund Trench. Most of them drawn out of his own diary, ed. Boyse, J. (London, 1693)Google Scholar; while for Emily, see, Clark, History of the Royal College of Physicians, I, 248Google Scholar. There are numerous, relatively unexplored notices of Goddard's father, Henry Goddard, sprinkled throughout the Calendar of State Papers Domestic for the Civil War and pre-Civil War period, e.g. C.S.P.D., 1644-45, p. 638. Dr. Paget's subscription to the Parliamentary Oath and Covenant, in the radical London parish of St. Stephen's, Coleman Street, survives in London, Guildhall Library, Ms. 4458/1, (Subscriptions to Covenant inserted after f. 841).

43 Based on the attendance records, kept by the Registrar for each session of the College, and recorded in the Annals.

44 D.N.B.; Munk Roll I, 199.

45 For a statement of Wright's religious position, see Winthrop Papers, (Boston [The Massachusetts Historical Society] 1929–1947), V, 138Google Scholar. SirBewley, Edmund Thomas, The origin and Early History of the Family of Pöe or Poe (Dublin, 1906)Google Scholar, discusses the Poe-Grent-Bastwick connection.

46 D.N.B. For Alston, see also, Birken, William, “The Puritan Connexions of Sir Edward Alston, President of the Royal College of Physicians 1655-1666,” Medical History 18 (Oct. 1974): 370–74CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

47 Quoted in, Munk, , Roll, I, 210Google Scholar.

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52 D.N.B.

53 Ibid.

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55 Aylmer, G. E., The State's Servants: the Civil Service of the English Republic, 1649-1660 (London, 1973), pp. 276–77Google Scholar. Those interested in following the political fortunes of the college into the Cromwellian period should see Sharp, Lindsay, “The Royal College of Physicians and Interregnum Politics,” Medical History 19 (April 1975): 107–28CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.