Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London

Charitable Knowledge explores the interconnections among medical teaching, medical knowledge and medical authority in eighteenth-century London. The metropolis lacked a university until the nineteenth century, so the seven major voluntary hospitals--St. Bartholomew, St. Thomas, Guy, the Westminster, St. George, the Middlesex, and the London--were crucial sites for educating surgeons, surgeon-apothecaries and visiting physicians. Lawrence explains how charity patients became teaching objects, and how hospitals became medical schools. She demonstrates that hospital practitioners gradually gained authority within an emerging medical community, transforming the old tripartite structure into a loosely unified group of de facto general practitioners dominated by hospital men. Historians of science and medicine will want to read this book.