HIST 249 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Canadian Medical Association, Antiseptic, Provincial Rights Party
Document Summary
Major period of transformation from 1860 - 1970s. Talking about the medical profession and how it achieved monopoly, status, and power. Talking about another fundamental development: the spread of medical specialisation. (dominant form of medical practice in much of the western world) Specialists started to outnumber general practitioners in the 1950s and 1960s but also in terms of power, status, medical schools etc. Since the middle ages they were fragmented into professions and guilds and doing different sorts of activities. The surgeon was responsible for tasks like bleeding. There are other kinds of groups like barber surgeons. They combined different activities from shaving to minor surgery. Apothecary: didn"t just sell but combined different elements into complex pharmaceutical combinations. These were separate professions with their own guilds and so on. Irregular practitioners in the 18th century: people who were called specialists (pre-modern specialists) who were outside the medical mainstream.
